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We were glad to see that three local schools were able to reopen on Wednesday after being closed for roughly a week due to rising COVID-19 cases.

Any time schools are closed, it impacts everyone with kids — and sometimes even those without.

It’s pretty obvious that all school administrators and the Troup County School Board want students in school.

That’s where students learn best, and although the data wasn’t completely clear just yet, it was obvious that students who spent the majority of the 2020 school year in the classroom fared better on the Georgia Milestone Assessment.

Students need to be in the classroom, whenever possible.

Of course, COVID-19 is a huge curveball that is constantly changing. It requires non-stop surveillance to ensure cases aren’t rising at an alarming rate.

And that’s what Superintendent Brian Shumate and other school-level adminstrators saw when they looked at data from Rosemont Elementary, Long Cane Middle and Long Cane Middle last week. Student cases were rising, and they were rising in clusters.

That’s not something they saw much last year, if ever, and it was alarming.

Shutting down the schools was the right decision, as we wrote last week.

Now, roughly seven days later, the doors are reopened and students will be back in the classroom. Let’s hope that cases don’t spike again.

However, it’d be unrealistic to think that we won’t be dealing with another rash of cases somewhere as this school system goes on. COVID-19 is spreading in our community like crazy right now, a majority of people aren’t vaccinated, and that seems unlikely to change in the next few weeks.

We trust that our school administrators have the best of our students in mind as we move forward.