I'm glad to see someone bringing these points up. I have been dealing with mild hearing loss for a little while now and have found Teams closed captioning to be extremely helpful, but my hearing is good enough that I usually manage fine on my own.

My daughter is hard of hearing, requiring hearing aids for help. She also relies a lot on lip reading to disambiguate sounds that she has difficulty making out. We learned this year that her reliance on lip reading and visual cues was much more than we ever realized. In large groups of people, she relies on lip reading to help determine who the speaker is.

When our school announced that it was doing "Zoom Meeting School"[0] and if classes resume in-person, mask wearing would be mandatory. It's tricky enough getting her accommodations at school -- and even with everything they offer, we knew that not being able to rely on lip-reading was going to put her at a huge disadvantage. We immediately enrolled our children in a local, public, online-only middle/high school. They have a few live-lessons a week, on Teams. The rest is reading, taking tests, writing papers and video-learning.

Out of the two children who were moved to online school[1], our daughter had the easiest time adjusting, but all of them are doing better than they were in the traditional program[1]. We'd noticed a few years ago that she was the kid who would hop on YouTube and decide to randomly learn how to do something. I partly wonder if her having a harder time understanding teachers has caused her to discover that she's a more efficient learner when she controls how it's done.

We were initially alarmed when the first month of classes went by and the kids were finishing a day of school in three to four hours, tops (Friday was 30 minutes!), but we were the only family in our neighborhood who left the district and by comparison, they're about a lesson ahead in everything and in addition to getting the best grades they've ever gotten, they actually know the material. It probably helps that my high-school son, who's getting into some pretty intense classes, has the benefit of 9 hours of sleep at night, and can start learning with an alert, wide-awake mind.

Incredibly, both of my kids are still on the fence about going back to in-person. I think a few more months will change their minds. Their choices: (a) Wake up at 05:30 so you can look appropriate enough to avoid getting picked on, stand out in the cold waiting for a bus, spend 7 hours in an old, cinder-block building that has more design elements in common with a prison than a place designed to foster creativity and learning vs. (b) Wake up at ... whenever ... finish up 3-4 hours of work while having every convenience of home that isn't allowed at school and have the freedom to experience life for the hours your friends are covertly sleeping through Math class.

[0] Our district has decided that the best approach to educating children is to simulate the classroom experience via a video call that the students must attend all day (with a two hour break).

[1] I have an odd parenting situation; two of my kids are home-schooled (parent-directed without professional educators) and two are (now) in online public school through a local school district.