Children tumble off a yellow school bus, where every other seat is marked with caution tape.
Wearing whimsical masks—one has whiskers, another rhinestones—they wait to get their temperatures checked before filing into the one-story school building. Inside Wesley Elementary in Middletown, Conn., plastic shields rise from desks, and cartoon posters exhort children to COVER YOUR COUGH. In the middle of a lesson, teacher Susan Velardi picks up her laptop and pans it so her students can see the screen. “Look,” she tells them, “I have a friend that’s joining us at home!”
There’s a new set of ground rules in Velardi’s classroom. “Your mask is on, and your mask stays like this. If we go outside if it’s nice, we have to sit apart,” she tells the students, who will…