It's not clear to me that this was a poor decision. You can't send children to school if there are no teachers. And the teachers were not going to put their lives on the line for those jobs. Teachers are well aware that whatever is going around among the students will get to them. They get every cold and ever flu.
If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fine, watch them yourselves."
Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.
If school boards said, "We're staying open for the sake of the children", teachers would have said, "Fine, watch them yourselves."
Compared to that, remote learning was a no-brainer. It's obviously deeply imperfect, and that cost students, but it at least made schooling possible. That literally may not have been the case any other way: send the students to a school building and they may have been the only ones there.