SACRAMENTO — Nearly 350,000 California students face an imminent choice: Get vaccinated for Covid-19 or stay home.
Los Angeles, Sacramento, San Diego and Oakland are the first large school districts in the nation to mandate Covid vaccines for older students, becoming a national test case for the logistical hurdles and possible lawsuits that lie ahead. Students there must get their first shot within weeks or leave classrooms in January.
While federal health officials say Pfizer's shot is safe and protective for children, inoculations have been politicized, and frustrated parents are already berating school boards across the country over everything from mask requirements to critical race theory. About a third of parents nationally say they will not get their children vaccinated for Covid, according to a recent Kaiser Family Foundation survey.
In California, however, some of the state's largest school districts say they have an obligation to protect students by increasing vaccination rates this winter. California has already moved aggressively by mandating teacher vaccines and indoor masks beyond other states.
“Why wait? To me, that feels irresponsible,” said Victoria Flores, director of student support and health services for Sacramento City Unified. “If this is within our power and our reach, we have a responsibility to do everything we can to keep our kids safe and our schools open.”
The districts are moving even faster than Gov. Gavin Newsom, who last month became the nation's first governor to declare a student vaccine mandate. His statewide order, however, isn't expected to go into effect until at least July — and only if the FDA grants formal approval to a vaccine for students younger than 16, something it has yet to do. The Newsom administration has been working with local health and school officials to figure out logistics and politics, neither of which are easy.
Monica Gandhi, an infectious disease expert at the University of California, San Francisco who has been influential during the pandemic, said she supports childhood vaccines and that her own child will get a Covid shot. But she questioned the legality of districts imposing a mandate before the FDA actually approves the vaccine for most school-age children and sympathized with parents who are still processing their decisions.
“There’s not a single other place that’s doing this. It’s new and it may take some time for people to feel comfortable with it — it may take six to eight months,” Gandhi said. “It’s totally understandable and justifiable that parents at this point want to wait for more safety data. It’s really important for parents to have some time.”
Gandhi withdrew her support for Newsom's vaccine mandate last week out of frustration that there is no plan to eliminate mask requirements once students get their Covid shot. She said the state and school districts are being unnecessarily tougher on children than adults.
The impending California district mandates will affect just over 340,000 students at least 12 years old, about 5.5 percent of California's 6 million public school students.
States have control over vaccine requirements, and U.S. Education Secretary Miguel Cardona treaded lightly last week on "The View" when asked about California efforts to require shots for students. "The role of the federal government is not to require vaccines," he said. "We don’t do that at the Department of Education but I do support the efforts across the country to keep our students safe, keep our educators safe."
Courts likely will have to settle the legality of California school districts mandating student Covid vaccines for attendance. San Diego Unified and Newsom predicated their student vaccine requirements on full FDA approval; in the San Diego district, the mandate only applies to students 16 and older. Districts may have a harder time, as Gandhi alluded, defending mandates of the Pfizer vaccine for younger students while it remains under emergency use authorization.
Already, plaintiffs in San Diego and Los Angeles have sued districts over their Covid vaccine mandates. The state chapter of Children's Health Defense, a group founded by anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr., argued in a lawsuit last month that Los Angeles Unified does not have the authority to impose a new vaccine mandate because only the state health department can do so. The group also alleged that the Los Angeles district failed to follow state procedures and misinterpreted state law by not allowing for personal belief exemptions.
Unlike San Diego and Los Angeles, Sacramento City Unified does allow for personal belief exemptions, though the district will require exempt students to regularly test negative for Covid to attend class. Otherwise, they will be transferred to an independent study program that Superintendent Jorge Aguilar said in a statement is “already challenged” and offers students the “bare minimum.”
Even school leaders promoting the need for childhood vaccines are warning of a troubled rollout. School administrators who are already dealing with pandemic staffing shortages must now call parents to convince them to get their children the shot. They also must operate vaccine centers on campus, create systems to upload proof of vaccinations and prepare to accommodate unvaccinated students with alternative options off campus.
In Sacramento, Flores was anxious last week about all of the logistics as her district prepared to launch its online vaccination portal, where parents will be asked to upload proof of their child’s inoculation by Nov. 30. Soon, school officials will be knocking on doors and making phone calls to those who remain unvaccinated.
The mandates also have put California Democrats who have long supported pandemic restrictions in a tough spot: They want youth vaccination rates to increase to protect school communities, but they also want as many students to remain in classrooms as possible.
Black and Latino Californians have lower vaccination rates than the state average, and residents living in low-income ZIP codes also lag, according to a report released this month by the Public Policy Institute of California.
“I am not prepared to vote on anything that could force over half of the Black and brown students out of the district because they are currently not vaccinated. I don't understand how we would move forward with that without having a plan,” Oakland Unified School Board member Mike Hutchinson said last week.
Oakland school board members narrowly agreed last week to mandate that students 12 and older be fully vaccinated by Jan. 1, transfer to the district's sole independent study program or leave the district entirely. Board members decided against alternatives such as limiting the mandate to students who want to participate in sports and group events or waiting for the state mandate to take place.
Hutchinson said a majority of eligible students are unvaccinated in his Oakland neighborhood, which is predominantly made up of families of color. He warned of the potential for civil rights lawsuits.
In San Diego, a 16-year-old has already filed suit against her school district, alleging a vaccine mandate set to take effect this month violates her religious freedom. San Diego Unified students 16 and up are required to get their first dose by Nov. 29 or they will be prohibited from campus, and the district does not allow exemptions outside of medical reasons.
Los Angeles Unified, the second largest school district in the nation, has begun to block student athletes from competition for missing an October deadline specific to sports participants. The district's wider student mandate takes effect in January.
School leaders are warning of student attrition — and the financial losses that could result because of lost attendance-based dollars from the state. “Families that refuse to get vaccinated may transfer to neighboring districts that do not yet have a vaccine mandate, and students may choose to pursue independent study in other districts that have been able to develop more robust remote learning opportunities,” said Aguilar, who supports his Sacramento district's mandate, in his October announcement.
The lift for school districts could soon get even heavier after the recent move by the FDA to expand the shot to children 5 to 11. But new polling shows that parents remain skeptical. A third of parents of 5 to 11-year-olds surveyed said they will “wait a while” to see how the vaccine is working in children. Another third of parents say they will “definitely” not get their children vaccinated.
While California boasts some of the highest vaccine rates in the nation, a third of 12- to 17-year-olds in the state remain unvaccinated, totaling more than 1 million children, according to the latest data from the Department of Public Health. That lags older groups; 21 percent of those 18 to 49 and 12 percent of those 50 to 64 are unvaccinated.
Community organizers are worried that students who may need in-person instruction the most will be turned away at school because they're unvaccinated.
“We've got parents that are going to yank them out of school… there's concern from a lot of people that children are going to be left home alone,” said Vanessa Aramayo, executive director of the Alliance for a Better Community, a Latino organization in Los Angeles.
“There aren't resources for homeschooling," she added. "There aren’t resources for child care, or child care facilities are closed and not accessible. So these are very, very difficult decisions for our parents to be making. And so we want to make sure that we're doing as much as we can to try to mitigate that.”
The Newsom administration has launched a parent engagement campaign with "culturally competent" messaging aimed at families with socioeconomic barriers, and the California Department of Public Health plans to establish vaccine centers at elementary schools across the state starting this month.
Last week, Newsom, who has routinely warned of the social-emotional impacts of distance learning, downplayed the mandate as “only for in-person instruction." Despite more parents having concerns about the new vaccines than long-established ones, Newsom equated Covid inoculations with those already required for students in California.
“There are 10 other vaccinations that your kids get for measles, mumps, rubella, whooping cough. I find it rather just extraordinary and fascinating some of these politicians out there that are just outraged that somehow their freedom has been impacted yet they're doing nothing about the previous mandates that they are accountable for,” Newsom said at a news conference last week, voicing support for districts implementing mandates now. “The politics around this are disturbing to me. Lives are quite literally at risk.”
Newsom reiterated that personal belief and religious exemptions are allowed under his plan despite local districts proposing otherwise. The Legislature, however, may change that when it returns to session in January.
Sen. Richard Pan (D-Sacramento), a physician who spearheaded legislation that forbids personal and religious exemptions for other school vaccines following measles outbreaks in 2015, said he's considering a bill to limit student Covid vaccine exemptions.
“The purpose of vaccination mandates are to keep schools safe. When it comes to exemptions, unfortunately, the data so far shows there’s a high likelihood that if we retained a personal belief exemption we may not be able to achieve the vaccination rates we need in order to keep schools safe for all children,” Pan said.
Assemblymember Akilah Weber (D-San Diego), a physician and a member of the California Legislative Black Caucus, does not support exemptions outside of legitimate medical concerns. But she remains concerned about the outreach that needs to be done leading up to school mandates, noting that there’s a difference between vocal anti-vaccine activists and parents of color who distrust the medical system.
“I understand the hesitancy. The medical community as a whole does not have a history of being honest and upfront with the Black community and minority communities. We have utilized those communities as the basis of experiments,” Weber said. “However, I also understand that Covid has had a devastating impact on those very same communities, and the only way we're going to get out of this is through the vaccine.”
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By: Mackenzie Mays and Isabella Bloom
Title: California schools: Get Covid shots or go back to distance learning
Sourced From: www.politico.com/states/california/story/2021/11/02/california-school-districts-get-covid-shots-or-go-back-to-distance-learning-1392141
Published Date: Tue, 02 Nov 2021 19:04:40 EST
