From my understanding, its mostly a logistics things. Some tiny towns are expecting to having huge surges of people and their infrastructure can't handle it. So they're telling people to stay at home instead and declared states of emergency. One school district already bought the glasses and are just giving them to students because of this.

We had one when I was a kid, and they had us poke a hole in a piece of paper, and then stand with our backs to the eclipse and watch it's shadow develop on the ground as projected through the paper. It was cool, but not as cool as actually seeing it directly.

The protective glasses are cheap, and there are lots of potentially dangerous things kids do at school.

I'm still salty over my elementary school, it was either 4th or 5th grade so would have been 1985 give or take a year. Total eclipse right in the middle of the school day. If they had cancelled school, I'd have been ok with that, but no, they cancelled recess and closed all the blinds and made us just sit there. Surprised they didn't make us hide under our desks.

Edit

After digging into this a bit (because of course I can't leave it alone) it probably wasn't a total eclipse... Not like I would remember since I didn't get to see it... But the only one that fits the time and region was May 30 1984, which was annular, and would have been 90-95% where I was...