LAUSD Backs Down On Vaccine Mandate For Students
LOS ANGELES, CA — Forced to decide between preventing 30,000 unvaccinated students from attending classes or pushing back the Los Angeles Unified School District's deadline for students to get the COVID-19 vaccine, the Board of Education opted to delay Tuesday.
Tuesday's decision was the culmination of a high-stakes standoff between the board and thousands of parents who refused to get their kids vaccinated. The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education agreed Tuesday to delay enforcement of its COVID-19 vaccine mandate for students until fall 2022. It was a controversial decision that was bound to frustrate parents on both sides of the vaccine issue.
For weeks, district officials had maintained that the mandate would remain in place to protect teachers, students and their families from the coronavirus. But as the deadline approached for students to have their second dose of the vaccine by Dec. 19. it became apparent that roughly 30,000 students would be out of compliance. Though it's a small minority of students in the nation's second-largest school district, it would have meant pushing 30,000 students into an online learning program.
The decision to back down on the student mandate comes just days after the district let go of hundreds of staffers who failed to meet the employee vaccine mandate.
Students taking part in extracurricular programs were required to receive their second dose by Oct. 31. The mandate had pushed tens of thousands of students to get the vaccine in the weeks leading up to the deadline this week.
In a statement Friday, the district announced plans to delay the mandate until the start of the next school year, in light of the overall high vaccination rate among students. Interim Superintendent Megan K. Reilly told the board Tuesday the vaccination rate among students now tops 87%.
The district's mandate does not include students under age 12, who are only encouraged but not required to get vaccinated.
District officials said they will continue working to ensure all students have access to vaccines, and that their families receive information they need "to make an informed choice" about vaccinating their children.
The move drew praise from the teacher's union as well as the district's new incoming superintendent Alberto Carvalho.
“The conditions that the board is facing today, and the policy adjustments are not, in my opinion, a reversal of decisions made,” he told the Los Angeles Times, adding that he viewed it as “an evolution of the previous board position.”
The United Teachers of Los Angeles threaded the needle between supporting the vaccine mandate as well as the decision to delay its enforcement.
“We support the district’s student and employee vaccinations requirements that remain our community’s best line of defense against COVID-19,” UTLA Secretary Arlene Inouye told the Times. “We also understand the huge challenges and potentially disastrous impact that transferring 30,000 students into an online independent study program would create for our students and their families.”
Board member Jackie Goldberg issued a statement saying the delay was a sensible move, noting that "taking teachers out of in-person classrooms so they can instruct the much smaller number of unvaccinated students in the state- mandated online independent study program penalizes all students with fewer instructors and larger class sizes."
But she insisted the district is not backing down from mandating the shots, despite another round of often-vitriolic comments from parents who lambasted the board during the meeting, calling the vaccine an experimental medication with no long-term track record of efficacy and no extended study of possible long-term side effects.
"The science is clear: vaccinations protect us," Goldberg said. "This pandemic is not over, and LAUSD may delay the eligible student vaccination deadline but will uphold the requirement."
While delaying the mandate itself, the board also voted Tuesday to expand the requirement to include all charter schools authorized by the district, regardless of their location. The original mandate applied only to charter schools that were co-located on LAUSD campuses.
The district will continue to require baseline and weekly testing of all students and staff, regardless of vaccination status, through January. Beginning in February, only unvaccinated students will be required to undergo weekly testing.
"Abundant praise and gratitude to the Los Angeles Unified students and families who have already met the vaccination requirement, staff who have worked under extreme hardship with grace and professionalism and our partners, who have supported our health and safety efforts," Reilly said in her statement last week. "Together, we continue to move toward the best and safest possible learning environment for all students and families."
City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.
This article originally appeared on the Pacific Palisades Patch
