South Australia has recorded three COVID-19 deaths, amid dips in the numbers of new cases and people in hospital.
The deaths are a man in his 60s and two men in their 80s.
There have been 1,735 new cases recorded, a decrease of 223 on the previous day.
However, both days represent the highest daily totals since late January.
There are now 142 people with coronavirus in hospital, a decrease of 50 on the previous day.
Thirteen people are in intensive care, four of them requiring ventilators.
The state now has 14,826 active cases.
Of the new cases in the two weeks until Tuesday, about a third of them were in people under the age of 19 — with school returning believed to be a driving factor.
Adelaide Hills mother-of-three Danielle McBeath believes her three children contracted COVID-19 through primary school.
Her eight-year-old son was a classroom contact on Wednesday, and her six-year-old twins were classroom contacts on Thursday.
"We've had a bit of a rough week with the three sick little ones, one after the other," she said.
"I definitely knew it would happen – I'm surprised it happened so quickly."
She said SA Health had closed at least one classroom and asked every child to be tested.
"I work in the dental industry and in people's mouths, and I have been coronavirus-free for the last two years, so I am surprised that the children being back for only two or three weeks did bring it home so quickly," she said.
Ms McBeath said her children's primary school had been "fantastic, empathetic and supportive" in contact with her family.
But she found it disappointing that the children's vaccine rollout had not started sooner.
"I think that lag in the rollout of vaccines for children has been really detrimental – it's a shame my children have only been able to be single-vaxxed so far," she said.
According to the Education Department, there are 320 teachers and 219 school support officers currently off work for COVID-related reasons, while 1.7 per cent of students are reporting as absent for COVID-related reasons.
Earlier today, an Adelaide Hills teacher also raised concerns about conditions for both staff and students, saying some classrooms have been half empty due to COVID outbreaks.
The teacher, who wished to remain anonymous, told ABC Radio Adelaide there were schools with fewer than 250 students dealing with more than 30 cases at once.
She said on top of dealing with high case numbers, teachers were not being told which students were testing positive and "sparse information" was being passed on to parents.
"Teachers are not being given information, so teachers are not privy to if the students are in their class, who the students are, what the numbers are — we are not allowed to be given any of that information," she said.
"The school leadership acts on advice from SA Health and the [education] department, but as teachers we are not allowed to have any communication with parents in regard to COVID."
She said teachers were aware of rising case numbers because more rapid antigen tests were being handed out.
She said teachers were also expected to use up their own sick leave if they wanted to seek a PCR test, among other concerns.
"Classrooms in schools are not made big enough to socially distance students," she said.
"Even at the peak of an outbreak, you still have children not wearing masks or, for instance, you have a directive for a group of students to be PCR tested, but [they can] come back to school while they wait for their results.
"So we are actively having positive children return to school, quite often without masks, sitting amongst children that are potentially negative, but being exposed to it."
Another teacher from a high school, who gave her name as Grace, said her experience so far had been positive.
"My experience is vastly different," she said.
"We've still got teachers and students who are positive cases at our school, however our leadership team has done a really amazing job providing information to the staff and families.
"It's not perfect, but the world isn't at the moment."
'How do you know if you're a close contact?'
Australian Education Union SA president Andrew Gohl said members had been raising many concerns about current conditions — particularly not being told which students were testing positive.
"How can you work out whether or not you're a close contact if you don't know who it is?" he said.
"How do you know if you're at risk and how do you know which action you're required to take if you don't have that information?
"There's privacy ... but you would think that sort of information can be discussed amongst staff and that those privacy concerns are kept within staff and of course you wouldn't expect it to go outside of the school in that respect."
He said it seemed the government was taking an approach of "keeping schools open, no matter what", which was causing problems for teachers.
"It is impacting upon the health and safety of staff, it's impacting upon the health and safety of students and it's impacting upon their industrial conditions, so I think it is a problem if that is the position of the government," he said.
Mr Gohl said given schools were acting under SA Health advice, he could only assume it was safe for students to be at school.
"But the system needs to be responsive to local issues when they arise," he said.
But Department for Education chief executive Rick Persse said his team was "being really responsive when we have a situation".
"We knew we were going to get cases but we're well within our tolerances," he said.
"We're working very, very closely with SA Health about working with schools where they've got several cases and so on.
"And we've got a range of strategies that we employ regarding PCR testing or maybe a short circuit-breaker and what we're seeing is that those interventions are really working."
Mr Persse said all classroom contacts, including other students and staff, were told on the same day about positive cases.
"We've [been] very transparent with that," he said.
Mr Persse said 4,000 temporary relief teachers could be deployed across the state when needed.
"We're getting cases amongst our staff, we always knew we would, but we're using less than 20 per cent of that resource at this stage," he said.
