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Oregon Governor Kate Brown is being criticized by some residents and teachers’ unions for her plan to prioritize school staff vaccinations over the state’s elderly population.
The plan will help the state reopen schools in the spring, Brown said in a statement Friday.
“I first made a commitment late last year to vaccinate educators and school staff in Oregon, and reaffirmed that commitment last week,” she said. declared, despite some negative reactions. “Educators can be immunized quickly, district by district. This choice represents swift action that will have a disproportionate impact on children in Oregon.”
The plan is a diversion from recommendations made by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that frontline healthcare workers and the elderly get vaccinated before other frontline workers.
Brown, however, maintains that “many ‘Oregon educators’ would not get vaccinated this school year” if she followed the CDC’s recommendations, “and the children of Oregon would continue to suffer.”
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“If we were to reverse that and prioritize the needs of Oregon’s children, it would delay the start of vaccinations for independent seniors by two weeks,” Brown said. “I know many grandparents in Oregon are happy to go just two more weeks in an effort to help their grandchildren get back to school as quickly and safely as possible.
The Educational Freedom Institute, a nonprofit think tank that supports school choice, says schools have the ability to safely reopen.
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“Substantial data indicates that schools can reopen safely in person and that schools are not the primary drivers of overall community transmission,” said Corey DeAngelis, director of School Choice at the Reason Foundation and executive director of EFI at Fox News. He pointed out New York City, which has a COVID-19 positivity rate of around 9% while the positivity rate in schools in the city is only 0.50%.
President Joe Biden is pushing for most American schools to reopen in his first 100 days in office, but the new administration’s testing czar recently admitted the schedule could be adjusted if necessary.
Teacher wearing N95 mask teaches math (iStock)
Francisca Alvarez, a second-grade Spanish teacher in Portland, who lives with her 78-year-old mother, told local media outlet KOIN on Thursday that she didn’t think going back to school would be safe despite efforts to immunize them. educators and other school staff.
Alvarez told the outlet that his mother barely survived COVID-19 and feared she might be re-infected.
“I want to be in class,” she said. “I don’t like to teach in this virtual way, but my mantra – my belief – is that if we survive, we can teach later, we can learn, we can close the achievement gap.”
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She added that reopening with COVID-19 safety measures in place, such as six feet of social distancing and the mandatory mask wearing that schools across the country have adopted to continue in-person or hybrid learning, would be a “torture” for the students and for the teachers.
“We are going back to school and the students still have to keep six feet apart and wear their masks,” she told KOIN. “They are little kids, and they’re dying to be around their classmates and they don’t understand, so my biggest concern is how am I going to keep them safe in school.”
The Portland Association of Teachers (PAT) and the Oregon Education Association (OEA) did not immediately respond to Fox News requests.
At least 55.1 million children are not in class due to the coronavirus pandemic, Education Week estimates. (Credit: Fox News)
Elizabeth Thiel, president of PAT, also told Oregon Public Broadcasting that vaccinating teachers would not be enough to reopen schools safely.
“Our schools are safe when our community is safe,” Thiel told the outlet. “Our educators and students come in and out of schools and go home to their families. You cannot have safe schools without safe communities.
DeAngelis suggested that public and private schools have different incentives, which may be part of the determining factor in public school teachers’ opposition to in-person learning.
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“Private schools have fought to reopen, but so many public schools and teachers’ unions are still fighting to stay closed,” he said. “The main difference is one of the incentives: one of those industries gets your money whether or not it opens doors for business.”
He added that “families get the small end of the stick” because if schools don’t reopen, families can’t just “take their children’s education money elsewhere” as they would if their grocery store. locale was closing.
The COVID-19 vaccine has yet to be proven effective in children, although vaccine manufacturers like Pfizer have recruited healthy volunteers to participate in studies to determine the effectiveness of inoculating the vaccine to minors.
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COVID-19 cases in Oregon are gradually declining after peaking during the holidays. The Oregon Health Authority said in its weekly report Thursday that daily cases were down 4% to 7,860 positive cases per day in the week starting Jan. 11 from the previous week. Hospitalizations have also declined slightly, but deaths have increased.
More than half of COVID-19 cases in the state are in people between the ages of 20 and 49, while people over 70 account for 77% of COVID-19-related deaths in Oregon.
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