California Teacher Vaccines Determined by Location and Luck Lost Coast Outpost

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How quickly teachers can expect to get vaccinated depends largely on where they live and could determine whether the majority of California students return to campuses this spring – or next fall.

Vaccination of teachers has become a central point of contention in the heated debate in California over the reopening of schools, as unions representing teachers and school employees have listed access to vaccines as one of their demands before return to campuses.

But, faced with limited supply and a duel between priority groups, many of California’s larger counties have yet to begin offering vaccines to teachers. And while some counties expect to start vaccinating teachers in the next week, several others told CalMatters that their scarcity of supply makes it difficult to predict when their educators might expect a dose. Some counties do not expect to offer vaccines to teachers until one month or the end of March.

County-by-county variance in teacher immunization spans the gamut:

• In Marin County, many campuses have been open for some time and educators started getting vaccinated last month.
• Teachers in Ventura County can probably get the vaccine in a month
• Santa Clara and San Mateo counties have no estimate of when this could happen.

Mixed messages and a decentralized approach resulted in a chaotic rollout of the vaccine around two months after the first priority doses arrived for frontline health workers in California in mid-December.

Gov. Gavin Newsom told a press conference today that schools are unlikely to physically reopen this school year if every teacher’s vaccination is a prerequisite. “When you get less than 600,000 first doses per week and you start to do the math … then we have to be honest with people and let them know … that it is very unlikely that we can achieve this very idealistic goal before. the end of the school year due to the scarcity of vaccine supply, ”he said.

Currently, many of the state’s larger counties are approaching or have started dispensing doses to those in the first tier of Phase 1B of the state’s immunization priority list. This large group includes 8.5 million Californians and includes teachers, farm workers and first responders as well as residents 65 and older.

Newsom acknowledged on Monday that the vaccine shortage had hampered the ability of local public health departments to immunize teachers in large numbers. A recent plan by the governor to get school districts to reopen campuses with additional per-student funding stalled after many school officials, unions and lawmakers said it was unworkable.

At his Monday press conference, Newsom said he hoped to announce a new school reopening agreement with the Legislature “this week” that would include “a prioritization framework for vaccinating our teachers.”

“The challenge is obvious,” Newsom said. “In each county they have different capacity issues, different demographics, different issues in terms of vaccine availability and how many people they have prioritized in those levels.”

Several public health experts as well as the governor, who is under intense public pressure to reopen K-12 public schools this spring, said in-person learning could be done safely without vaccinating educators if involved. to strict preventive measures such as masking, ventilation. and cohort students.

Newsom, who recently told principals that requiring teachers to be vaccinated for the reopening of schools would effectively keep them closed this spring, cited “low” transmission numbers in reopened schools as evidence that teaching in no one has resulted in greater spread in the community. In January, 87 cases were linked to schools, a figure according to Newsom lower than in November and December despite the surge in cases and deaths in the state.

The state, however, has yet to release data on school cases to confirm the figures cited by Newsom. It remains one of the few states that does not publicly know which schools are open and whether they have experienced epidemics. Under new state leadership, the California Department of Public Health began collecting this information from schools on January 25; The agency said in a statement Friday that it would provide the information on its school’s new website “in the near future.”

Counties Race Against Time

In many larger California counties, decreasing hours have raised the stakes in the complicated race to vaccinate educators. Most public schools in the state complete the academic term in late May and early June, and complete inoculation requires the administration of two doses of vaccine spaced a month apart.

Santa Clara County was not having educators vaccinated on Friday, and health and education officials could not come up with a schedule at this time, mainly due to the limited vaccine supply, they said. Neighboring San Mateo County remains in phase 1A and prioritizes “eligible people at greater risk of death”. Other large counties such as San Diego, San Joaquin and Kern do not yet vaccinate educators, citing the scarcity of vaccines.

Counties like Marin and Napa, where many campuses have reopened, began vaccinating some of their educators last month. Several small rural counties have made greater strides in immunizing their teachers compared to larger counties.

Sacramento County officials expect teachers to be able to sign up for immunization appointments “in the coming weeks,” according to the offer.

Ventura County health director Dr Robert Levin said he expects the vaccine to be available to teachers “within a month”.

Meanwhile, Shasta County, where all but two schools offer in-person classes, plans to host its first immunization clinic for educators on Saturday. Placer County recently opened its clinic for educators.

Joe Prado, director of the Fresno County Public Health Division, said the county is “looking at the end of March through April” as the first vaccines would be offered to educators based on current supply and demand. The delay between doses would result in an in-person instruction from April or May in this case. Prado said the limited week-to-week vaccine supply allocated to the county has made it “really difficult” to design a faster rollout for those eligible for Phase 1B.

Several districts in Fresno County, including Clovis Unified, began offering in-person classes last fall before the last wave. This week, as the case rate in the county fell below 25 positive cases per 100,000 residents, closed campuses will again be allowed to reopen for elementary students, according to Dr Rais Vohra, head of health by Fresno County Acting.

“Our experience in Fresno County is that whenever all of these different layers of protection are implemented, the number of transmissions and outbreaks is really low, especially compared to what is happening in the rest of our. community, ”Vohra said.

In Orange County, a spokesperson for the county’s education department said educators could become vaccine eligible between mid-February and late February, “assuming doses are available.” The county plans to roll out teacher immunization based on exposure risk, meaning teachers working closely with children with special needs would be ahead of educators working remotely.

Alameda County, which entered Phase 1B this week, also plans to prioritize immunization for educators who teach in person, according to County Superintendent LK Monroe. About 325,000 residents are eligible for Phase 1B, according to county estimates, requiring 650,000 doses of vaccine and at least a month’s time to complete vaccinations before moving down the system at multiple levels of the state.

“If every educator came at the same time to be vaccinated, it would not be possible under the current conditions,” said Monroe.

Alameda Unified, among the first districts in the county to set a reopening date, plans to bring K-5 students back on March 8 without vaccinating teachers. At a recent board meeting, Superintendent Pasquale Scudari cited public health advice and recent remarks from the director of the Centers for Disease Control as evidence “that elementary schools can be safely reopened before the complete vaccination ”.

The county told superintendents it expected to receive between 10,000 and 15,000 doses of the vaccine per week, Scutari said, well below demand. Since the district has set a firm return date, its teachers would likely have priority for immunization.

Following growing parental frustrations and a mayor-backed city attorney trial, San Francisco Unified struck a tentative deal with its employee unions over the weekend that tie vaccine access to the reopening.

As part of the plan, the school would gradually make a return to campuses if the city reached the state’s red level for the reopening of schools and businesses – meaning, less than 7 positive cases per 100,000 population – if teachers and staff have access to the vaccine. San Francisco schools would physically reopen in the Orange level without the vaccination requirements under the plan.

Dr Jeanne Noble, director of COVID response for the UC San Francisco emergency department, said the deal was unlikely to result in students returning to campus anytime soon. Realistically, Noble said, it could take “a minimum of 10 weeks” to vaccinate all teachers in town given the current supply.

Noble and other health professionals have called on schools to reopen this month without vaccinations. Schools can operate safely with strict security measures, she said, and an 11-month absence from schools has taken a toll on the mental and physical well-being of students.

“This is not a proposal or deal that would lead to in-person education this year simply because of the scarcity of vaccines and the logistics required to roll it out,” Noble said.

“I think that potentially makes it more likely that they will go back to school when San Francisco is back in the orange level.”

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Barbara Feder Island contributed to this story. CALmatters.org is a non-profit, non-partisan media company explaining the politics and politics of California.