Students and staff in Wake County schools will have to wear masks in the classroom, at least until coronavirus case counts come back down again.

The Board of Education voted unanimously Tuesday to make face masks mandatory in school buildings and on buses. The board voted to follow the state's StrongSchools toolkit, which means fully vaccinated students and staff will still have to wear masks.  

“Is unmasking a priority over being in-person in the classroom?” board member Roxie Cash asked. She said she was worried about children being sent home for long quarantines if the county didn’t require masks in Wake County schools.

"We want to keep kids in school, and we want to keep kids safe," board chair Keith Sutton said shortly before the vote.  

Guidance from the Department of Health and Human Services says students and staff should all wear masks while indoors. But the state left it up to each school district to decide on the mask rules for themselves.

Hundreds of demonstrators lined up on both sides of the issue outside the school board meeting and inside.

Daily coronavirus case counts are back up to levels not seen in North Carolina for months, with DHHS reporting almost 2,200 new cases Tuesday. There are 1,465 people in the hospital with COVID-19, according to DHHS.

Public health officials say the more-contagious delta variant is driving the new surge in case numbers. The state's vaccination campaign has been lagging in recent months. About half the people in North Carolina have gotten at least one vaccine shot.

"The current delta variant is a much more infectious organism," said Dr. Danny Benjamin, with Duke University. He told the school board the new variant was just as infectious as chicken pox.  

"This is a much, much more transmissible virus than we were facing a year ago," he said. But masks continue to be effective, Benjamin said. He is part of the ABC Science Collaborative, which has been studying how to keep students and staff safe while reopening schools for in-person classes.

Without masks, Benjamin told the Wake County school board, school districts should expect to see schools forced to close by coronavirus outbreaks.

He said the death rate for students is up to five per 100,000.

"Keep in mind that your school district, with 160,000 students, does not have the luxury of a school district with, say, 5,000 or 10,000 students where they can hope, they can keep their fingers crossed that if they infect a bunch of students and adults in their schools that they'll probably get away without killing anyone," he told the board.

Of the state's 116 county and local school districts, at least 45 districts have voted to make masks optional, according to data compiled by Spectrum News 1. Most of those districts have been in rural or suburban areas.

More urban districts like Charlotte-Mecklenburg, Forsyth and Guilford have voted to require face masks for students and staff.

Masks in the classroom has sparked heated debate across North Carolina, with protesters showing up at board meetings arguing that decisions over masks should be left to parents. Many have also spoke up in favor of masks in schools.