The Los Angeles Unified School District isn’t fooling around when it comes to enforcing its vaccine mandate. The school board voted to fire 496 employees who refused to be vaccinated. They also voted to enact a policy in which any student 12 years old and older beginning the January term who hadn’t been vaccinated will not be allowed on campus and will be forced to take an online independent study program.
Currently, there are about 34,000 students who are not in compliance with the mandate.
“We care deeply about all of our employees,” interim superintendent Megan K. Reilly said in a statement. “Parting ways with individuals who choose not to be vaccinated is an extremely difficult, but necessary decision to ensure the safety of all in our school communities.”
The 496 fired employees represent less than one percent of the total 73,000 employees who work for the school district. All of them had been laid off since October when the district required proof of vaccination. As for the kids, it’s too late for the children to receive both doses of the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine since the second dose needs to be administered six to eight weeks after the first one.
There’s a small problem in shifting 34,000 kids into an online learning program: it’s not even close to being ready yet.
Shifting 34,000 students into independent study would be challenging because the program faces staffing shortages, according to the Times.
In a statement Wednesday, Los Angeles Unified said about 85% of the district’s approximately 600,000 students are in compliance with the mandate requiring those 12 and older to get their COVID-19 shots.
That percentage includes students who have received at least one vaccine dose, individuals with a medical exemption or those who qualify for conditional admission to the district, the Times reported. This last group include homeless or foster youths, students whose families are in the military and certain special education students.
How many of these students have already slipped through the cracks and have had their education fatally stunted? In Los Angeles, it’s going to get worse.
If Los Angeles follows through with forcing unvaccinated students into online learning, they may suffer, Petrilli said. “There’s too much focus on covid and not as much on academic achievement,” he said.
Emerging research has shown that throughout the pandemic, the less in-person instruction students had, the worse the students performed academically, said Robin Lake, director of the Center on Reinventing Public Education, a nonpartisan research and policy group. She said this was particularly true of lower-income students and students of color, who tended to remain in virtual classes longer than their peers because schools in urban areas often stayed closed longer.
“The bottom line is that the kids who are already more likely to be behind academically fell further behind during the pandemic, in part because they were in virtual learning longer than other kids,” Lake said.
We are going to be seeing the tragic effects on these kids for the rest of their lives as a result of these policies. And we can point the finger directly at administrators and teachers who slow-walked the reopening of in-person classes despite recommendations from the CDC that it was safe to reopen.
Now the Los Angeles school district wants to deliberately handicap children because of their failure to obey a mandate on vaccination. It’s one thing when the excuse is a pandemic. It’s another thing when the district chooses a policy that they know will damage the education of tens of thousands of children.
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