With less than three weeks before school begins, school board members were told that cases of COVID-19 are rising again in Rapides Parish, thanks to the delta variant. The district's plan to reopen schools as the pandemic continues calls for masks and vaccinations to be optional even as one health official again told members during a Tuesday meeting that students were safer at school than at their homes because of measures the district enacted last year. Still, later in the committee meeting, one board member was successful in sending two motions to the full board that asks to keep masks voluntary and not to force students or employees to get vaccinated.