With schools set to start in a couple weeks, most parents of kindergartners are working to make sure to get required vaccinations for their children before sending them off to school.

But not all parents. Over the last decade, more parents have opted their children out of vaccination requirements through the use of nonmedical religious exemption – especially in recent years following the COVID-19 pandemic.

The number rarely rises above a percent or two of an incoming kindergarten class, typically accounting for no more than a couple hundred children per year. But that means that in the years since 2002, a total of more than 10,000 kindergartners have attended public and private schools without vaccination records, according to historical data from the Maryland Department of Health.

The rising percent of religious exemptions in recent years may point to increasing rates of vaccine hesitancy among families, said Daniel Salmon, a professor and director of the Institute for Vaccine Safety at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

“We’ve seen a post-COVID increase,” Salmon said. “With COVID … things got really polarized with more misinformation and disinformation. Vaccinations became a very political topic. And that’s not helpful.”

Maryland law requires that children have a handful of vaccinations when they enter kindergarten, in order to protect themselves and their classmates from transmissible diseases, such as measles, polio and chickenpox, among others. Children can be exempted if there is a medical reason they cannot receive a vaccine or a religious restriction against it.

The process to invoke the religious exemption in Maryland is simple. Parents can just sign a form that says: “Because of my bona fide religious beliefs and practices, I object to any vaccine(s) being given to my child.”

Elizabeth Elliott, president of the Maryland Association of School Health Nurses, said she understands the need for exemptions, but she said it is also important that as many children as possible be vaccinated.

“Herd immunity is really important for those of us – kids, staff members, families – in a school community that, for medical reasons, can’t be vaccinated,” Elliott said. “It’s incumbent upon the rest of use to vaccinate ourselves and our children to protect those of use who can’t have the vaccine because it’s unsafe.”

But tracking vaccine hesitancy is a tricky task, according to Salmon, and there are many factors that contribute to why some families don’t get their kids vaccinated.

“It’s really hard to answer that question based on data, based on how you measure vaccine hesitancy,” he said. “So the best measure we have is the proportion of children entering school who have a nonmedical exemption.”

The earliest data readily available from the state is from the 2002-2003 school year, in which 0.2% of kindergartners got a religious exemption, or about 126 kids out of roughly 63,000 entering kindergarten that year.

The rate increased steadily over the years: Ten years later, for example, about 0.6% of kids had religious exemptions, resulting in about 419 kids not receiving vaccinations in 2012-2013.

Religious exemptions spiked in 2019-2020 when 2.7% of kindergartners, or 1,641 kids, opted out of vaccination requirements. The COVID-19 pandemic went into full swing in the spring of 2020, so those families would have opted out prior to the the rise in cases in the United States.

Since the 2021-2022 school year, at least 1 percent of kindergartners in Maryland had a medical exemption – a couple hundred a year.

While the percent and numbers have increased, Salmon believes the numbers are not rising high enough for major concern.

“It’s a pretty small number,” he said. “I guess it’s a big increase by percentage, it’s a fair number of kids, but the absolute numbers are fairly small.”

He also noted that a state average does not tell the entire story of vaccine hesitancy.

“It’s also misleading because the exemptions tend to cluster geographically, socially, and the state average can can’t capture that social, geographical cluster issues,” he said.

In the last school year, there were higher concentrations of religious exemptions in some of Maryland’s more rural counties. The highest rate of religious exemptions were in Worcester (4.21%) and Cecil (3.75%). But Baltimore City also ranked high for religious exemptions, at 2.05% of kindergartners.

Maryland tends to fall behind the national average of religious exemptions, according from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In 2022-2023, the national average for nonmedical exemption was 2.8% of kindergartners, compared to Maryland’s 1.4% for that year.

Salmon notes that there are many factors since the pandemic that have led to more parents seeking out exemptions from vaccination requirements.

“There’s not a simple answer. It’s a mixture of people not being aware of the diseases … people worried about the safety of vaccines, often full of misinformation and disinformation,” he said. “We need to do a better job of communicating to parents more broadly, listen to people’s concerns and be empathetic and address them with the best available science.”

Elliott added that there are other underlying reasons why some families seek a religious waiver.

“What I often see now is families signing the religious objection because it’s too difficult to get to their children their vaccines … It’s not surprising to hear, ‘Well, I just couldn’t get to the clinic.’ So they just signed the religious waiver,” she said, noting that this issue gets more common in middle school.

Elliott agreed with Salmon that the best way to reach families who are hesitant about vaccinating their kids is to be is to be understanding and respectful. She said that as a school nurse, it is part of her responsibility to help families understand why vaccines are important for health and safety in a school setting.

“We are the ones that will view the records and ensure compliance and reach out to families,” she said. “It is a state requirement that students are immunized. And we spend lots and lots and lots of time picking up the phone and having those conversations, politely and respectfully, informing those parents.”

is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Maryland Matters maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Steve Crane for questions: editor@marylandmatters.org. Follow Maryland Matters on and .

Public schools and government agencies that require COVID-19 vaccinations could face lawsuits from anyone barred entry for failing to comply, according to a proposal the Louisiana Legislature approved Monday.

, authored by Rep. Larry Bagley, R-Stonewall, passed the House and Senate after multiple rounds of amendments. Bagley, a retired educator, chairs the House Health and Welfare Committee.

The bill passed by a 58-32 vote in the Louisiana House of Representatives and by a 27-5 vote in the Louisiana Senate.

Originally, Bagley’s legislation would have made it a crime to deny someone entry based on their vaccination status in Louisiana with a fine of up to $1,000 with the possibility of up to six months in jail time. The bill was amended to make vaccination status discrimination a cause for civil action and not a crime. The jail time was also removed through an amendment, but the $1,000 fine remained on the version the House approved Monday.

It also applied to restaurants, hotels and other areas of the private sector until .

The bill also originally applied to all types of vaccination  but was narrowed to only apply to the COVID-19 shot.

“This bill is really designed to be one of free choice and also (protect against) discriminating against those that choose not to have the vaccine,” said Sen. Barry Milligan, R-Shreveport, who brought the bill to the Senate floor.

The Louisiana Department of Health lists vaccinations for measles, polio, meningitis and other illnesses as required for students to attend K-12 schools and post-secondary institutions, but parents or guardians can submit a waiver to exclude their children from the requirement.

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Louisiana Illuminator maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Jarvis DeBerry for questions: info@lailluminator.com. Follow Louisiana Illuminator on and .

“Anything with ‘a sociological or cultural theme.’”

Lately, the phone at the Minnesota School Boards Association has been ringing off the hook with dozens of calls from anxious leaders of small school districts — sometimes very small — facing a common quandary. 

They have been inundated with public records requests seeking millions of documents with information on everything from their schools’ COVID protocols to classroom materials, names of teachers and the buildings where they work, even text messages that mention race or social-emotional services.

Sometimes the requests come from law firms. Often they come from local residents who have protested mask and vaccine requirements at school board meetings. Clearly boilerplates, some letters go to multiple districts at once. 

The school officials making the phones ring are anxious about a range of things. There’s the cost and labor required to fulfill the requests, which districts report have skyrocketed in the last six months. There are demands that information be produced on tight timelines — sometimes bolstered by legal citations that don’t apply in Minnesota. And particularly when the person asking for information has been a loud fixture at board meeting protests, there are fears about being singled out for retaliation. 

It’s a variation of a scenario playing out across the country, as local groups — often loose organizations of people initially angered by schools’ responses to COVID-19 — coalesce around how topics related to race, history, the LGBT community and antisemitism are taught. Some are getting help from national organizations and law firms.

In Owatonna, about an hour south of the Twin Cities, attorneys representing a local organization requested correspondence and documents in August that officials estimated would encompass 2 million pages. The district’s human resources director has been chipping away at it, in addition to her regular duties and the additional strains of keeping schools staffed during a pandemic.

In nearby Rochester, school leaders warned that it would cost an estimated $900,000 to fulfill a 41-page request from the local group Equality in Education for materials mentioning a broad range of subjects including critical race theory, equity and anything with “a sociological or cultural theme.” 

The Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school system received a request that it initially estimated would take two years to fulfill. The requesting attorney, whose Twin Cities law firm takes on far-right legal battles, trimmed the list of keywords he wanted searched, and the district hired two people to review the resulting documents for private data that would need redacting. District leaders now anticipate delivering the records by the end of the calendar year.  

Laws vary from state to state as to what reimbursement schools can collect for answering public records requests, but under Minnesota’s Data Practices Act, districts must cover some potentially significant expenses. This year, the school boards association, among others, is to either find funds to pay for fulfilling the requests or allow districts to recover all costs from requesters. 

This, in turn, has prompted freedom of information advocates to ask the Legislature not to change the law or to make accessing public data more expensive. They have on their side a recent Minnesota Supreme Court ruling that government agencies must fulfill even public records requests they find “burdensome.”

There’s nothing new about people frustrated with notoriously opaque school districts. Or about government officials grousing about the obligation to comply with the law — particularly when they find themselves in the hot seat. But freedom of information is never more important than when trust between the public and public institutions is low.

Watching nervously as the debate rages, Minnesota’s government transparency advocates worry: Will freedom of information survive? 

THE RECORD KEEPERS

“Politically motivated, overreaching demands that are designed to bury districts.”

When reporters ask for records under a state or federal freedom of information law, they often work to phrase their request in a way that it is comprehensive enough to compel public officials to produce everything relevant, and yet specific enough that it can be fulfilled in a reasonable amount of time. Requests rarely run more than one or two pages. 

On Sept. 20, 2021, the interim superintendent of Rochester Public Schools received a records request that is 41 pages long and asks for 20 months worth of documents. Prepared by a Minneapolis law firm on behalf of Equality in Education, it set a deadline of Dec. 15. One reason the request is so long is that it seeks information for almost all of the district’s two dozen schools — to identify classrooms and other specific places where the topics in question are under discussion — as well as for individual officials and board members.

In addition to an exhaustive list of search terms such as “equity, social justice, cultural competency, race, intersectionality” or critical race theory, it asks for curriculum covering history, social studies, geography, English, English literature, U.S. history and world history, and “any courses with a sociological or cultural theme [and] any courses with a curriculum that includes a discussion of current events.”

The request also seeks a list of vendors that have produced materials on the aforementioned topics for district schools, groups that have rented school facilities, student groups that use related resources and materials, and communications with the state’s teacher union, Education Minnesota, and other unions. 

Requests for keyword searches of staff emails are common, says interim Superintendent Kent Pekel. But Equality in Education is seeking communications from every principal in the district, among other employees.

“You can imagine some principal is just sending email to someone on their staff about an equity training they did or a workshop they attended,” he says. “This sent a very cold chill through our buildings.”        

Equality in Education does not appear to have an internet presence, and the request did not name any individual associated with the group. The Minneapolis law firm that sent the letter outlining the records sought is Mohrman, Kaardal & Erickson, which did not respond to email from ����Ӱ�� asking if a representative of Equality in Education or the group’s lawyer would comment for this story.

Here’s an additional fact about the 41-page data request that Rochester Public Schools has received: it would cost us $900,000 to fulfill every aspect of the request. That’s $$$ and time that would otherwise go to educating Rochester students.

— Kent Pekel (@KentPekel)

In November, the district responded to the group’s attorney, saying the estimated cost of fulfilling the request was $901,121, which by law it could ask to be paid before starting the work. 

The cost is so high because principals, teachers and other staff would have to comb through emails, textbooks, professional development materials and other documents throughout the entire district and decide whether they contain the aforementioned sociological or cultural themes, says Pekel. Because of this, fulfilling the request would take more than 13,000 hours.  

In an effort to make information accessible to the general public, limits the costs government agencies can pass along to people lodging data requests. Anyone may ask to inspect an existing document in person for free and must be allowed to take a photo of it. If someone wants copies, electronic or paper, the agency may charge for the time spent compiling information, as well as making the copies. Districts cannot seek reimbursement for the cost of vetting and redacting records for information that might violate student or employee privacy laws. 

In response to people who say this sounds like an immense expense, freedom of information advocates point out that taxpayers have already paid to collect the information and that with the state’s law nearly a half-century old, most public entities long ago built the cost of compliance into their budgets.  

The executive director of the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, Scott Croonquist, says he is unaware of anyone tracking which school systems have budgeted for the costs of complying with public records requests. “I’m just guessing that given what’s been happening lately, that districts are going to be looking harder at putting more money into a line item to be prepared,” he says.  

While Minnesota — at least in the law — errs on the side of public access, it does not set a timeline for agencies to fulfill requests, saying only it must be “reasonable.” Disputes can be taken, free of charge, to the state Department of Administration. Requesters may also sue. If they win, they are entitled to recoup the cost of going to court. 

What’s “reasonable,” of course, is the subject of endless debate. In 2018, the Minnesota Supreme Court ruled that government offices can’t reject requests for being “burdensome.” They can and frequently do suggest ways for narrowing a search or reframing it to be quicker and easier to fulfill, but the person asking for the data doesn’t have to agree. 

The first request received by Owatonna Public Schools in August included 26 search terms and any records involving complaints about equity initiatives and teacher training, and asked for the documents to be delivered in 35 days. 

After some back and forth with the district, United Patriots for Accountability and its Twin Cities law firm, the — which has as one mission the “fight against Critical Race Theory indoctrination” as well as “CRT’s twin: forced teaching and training on and acceptance of anti-Christian non-binary-gender ideology” — removed seven keywords.

Because the records would have to be screened for privacy concerns, the district’s human resources director, Chris Picha, took on the task. It took her six weeks to compile and redact documents in response to the just first four keywords, at a cost of $14,000 in labor alone. 

The request to the Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan school system also came from the Upper Midwest Law Center. District officials say they gave an estimate of how long it would take to fulfill the firm’s request, as freedom of information advocates and state officials advise — in this case, two years. The lawyers pared back the data they were asking for and agreed to receive the results in chunks. 

“We’re asking for reasonable parameters,” says district communications director Tony Taschner. “But somebody halfway across the country can lodge a request and we have to spend local levy money on it.” 

In November, the editorial boards of two southern Minnesota newspapers fired shots across the local requesters’ bows. In late November, the Mankato Free Press lodged in Owatonna and Rochester were “politically motivated, overreaching demands that are designed to bury districts.” The Rochester paper followed with extolling the importance of the public records law, underscoring that parents “absolutely have the right to know” if critical race theory is being taught, but suggesting that information could be obtained with a much narrower request. 

“If Equality in Education has other motives,” the editors wrote, “well, we wish them good luck as they peruse the tens of thousands of pages of documents in their search for a third-grade teacher’s text message that uses the words ‘race’ and ‘critical’ in the same sentence.” 

In a response to the Mankato paper’s editorial, James V.F. Dickey, senior trial counsel for the Upper Midwest Law Center, defended the scope of United Patriots for Accountability’s appeal for documents. “If Owatonna were truly not teaching [critical race theory], and if there was no real concern that teachers within the district are doing so, the data request would have yielded few, if any, results,” he wrote, adding that it was inappropriate to “lump in” his request with the one filed in Rochester.

In an email to ����Ӱ��, Dickey added that his clients visit district offices at agreed-upon times during the school day to review documents as they become available, for free.

THE OPEN RECORDS WATCHDOGS

“If we look at this solely as a public records issue, we’re not going to fix it.”

One of the people answering the phone at the is Executive Director Kirk Schneidawind. Because many of the boards his organization represents are too small to have staff dedicated to fulfilling public records requests, the association has long been a go-to source for advice. 

To judge from the calls pouring in to the association, every district in the state recently got identical letters from a Texas law firm seeking extensive personnel information. Other requests district leaders have asked for advice about say the recipient has 10 days to provide the data and cite a non-Minnesota statute as justification for the deadline. Schneidawind and his colleagues have tried to provide clarity about districts’ actual obligations. 

Minnesota’s law has provisions intended to protect government agencies from becoming swamped with frivolous requests, says Don Gemberling, spokesperson for the . This includes allowing agencies to ask for costs up front, as Rochester has done. The state has also advised agencies on how to stop responding to people who repeatedly ask for records but don’t retrieve documents prepared for them.   

The process of complying with freedom of information requests has changed over the last couple of decades, says Gemberling, who used to be the Department of Administration official responsible for helping agencies interpret the law, in part because the increase in digital records has enabled people to ask for keyword searches. This can turn up a very large number of relevant documents — but the data is still public.

“If someone comes in and wants to see all of your curriculum matter on the Roman Empire, that’s public information,” says Gemberling, who has also issued opinions about some of the extremes to which the process can be pushed. “If someone comes in with a large request, you can say, ‘We will do our best, and that may take us weeks or months.’”

A member of the Minnesota Council on Government Information’s board, Matt Ehling says there’s nothing new about high-profile events provoking large public records requests. “This happens whenever there’s a controversial incident,” he says. “The Data Practices Act has survived all this time because it has that ‘reasonable time’ provision.” 

Gemberling says that in his experience, school districts are prone to giving the public unclear answers about controversial topics. That people get frustrated and seek alternate means of finding information should surprise no one, he says.

Still, the school board association, along with the Association of Metropolitan School Districts, this year plans to ask state lawmakers to “allow school boards to recover all reasonable costs of fulfilling public data requests.” No bill has yet been filed, and neither group has yet said whether it wants the cost to be borne by the state or the people requesting the records.

“We’re hopeful there will be some way to charge back for those costs,” says Schneidawind. “Or any type of relief on excessive requests. Maybe paying for the staffing this will require.”

On the other side is, among others, the , led by journalists and librarians. “When government entities have sought to impose new limits on public requesters, we have always stressed the flexibility of existing law, and worked to enhance knowledge about the options available to government entities,” the council wrote in a letter to lawmakers. Noting that complaints about the law from public agencies are nothing new, the council continued, “This is something we continue to highlight at the current time, particularly as the Minnesota School Board Association has included calls for ‘recovering costs’ associated with data requests in its 2022 legislative agenda.”

Shifting the cost of compliance onto the people asking for records would constrict access to public information, the letter says: “Particularly in times of public controversy — such as those we currently find ourselves in — public knowledge about government operations is paramount.”

A law professor at Ohio State University, Margaret Kwoka recently published a book on freedom of information laws. Historically, use of such laws for abuse and harassment has been rare, she says, and most public agencies build the cost of complying into their budgets.

“I’m always skeptical of having more ways we can deny requesters,” she says, noting that increasing fees will pose a serious challenge for local news outlets, which already often struggle to get their requests fulfilled.  

Besides, she says, the debate skirts the heart of the matter. “One way of looking at this is it’s not really about public records, it’s really about academic freedom,” says Kwoka. “If we look at this solely as a public records issue, we’re not going to fix it.”

A PRAIRIE FIRE IS LIT

“Not hearing what I have to say…will be extremely detrimental to your position.”

Located in far southeastern Minnesota, Lewiston-Altura Public Schools has 625 students. Like most small-town school administrators, its superintendent, Gwen Carman, counts fielding public records inquiries among her many duties.

In November, she started getting unusual requests. There was one for data on COVID-19 tests administered and their results, and another asking whether there was a hazardous materials protocol for disposing of face masks. Several sought information about school board members’ pay, their attendance at board meetings and liability insurance the district carried for them.  

Then came a request for the first, middle and last names of every person who works for the district, as well as email addresses, job titles, date of hires and the buildings where they work. The biggest request demanded anything turned up by a keyword search of Carman’s and board members’ emails regarding critical race theory, social-emotional learning or — curiously — how Lewiston-Altura proposes to comply with a school improvement law.

“I haven’t gotten the invoices yet, but the legal fees are going to be high,” says Carman. “We’re spending hours on this.”

While residents seeking public records in communities like Lewiston may not be formally organized, there are national organizations coaching people on filing their requests. One such group is Parents Defending Education, a national nonprofit that sprung up last spring to counter what it sees as indoctrination in schools. According to its website, it investigates efforts “to impose toxic new curriculums and to force our kids into divisive identity groups based on race, ethnicity, religion and gender.” 

“We have extensive experience , so contact us with tips and ideas that you’ve got for documents we should try to get,” the website states. “And if you file your own and think you’ve found something great, let us know — we can put it on our IndoctriNation Map and help to publicize your results!” The site offers a database of state laws.

There is also a searchable list of consultants and groups that work with school systems to provide training and other services relating to diversity and inclusion, LGBT students and anti-racism, among other topics. Visitors can download relevant contracts and other public documents.   

The group’s IndoctriNation Map displays incidents — links, documents or synopses of school district controversies — and parent organizations, which it notes are not necessarily affiliated. Some of the places where school systems are being asked for large numbers of records appear on its Minnesota map.

Parents Defending Education did not reply to ����Ӱ��’s request for comment. 

Rosemount-Apple Valley-Eagan, for instance, made the map for a teacher reading her fourth-graders “Something Happened in Our Town,” a story about how two families of different races process the killing of a Black man by police, in the wake of George Floyd’s killing. Qorsho Hassan, Minnesota’s first Somali teacher of the year, was the subject of protests and social media campaigns.

Parents Defending Education is not the only national organization helping people use freedom of information laws to investigate school districts. The year-old advocacy organization Moms for Liberty, which has two Minnesota chapters, who are concerned about issues ranging from mask mandates to books in school libraries on how to use public records laws to hold local government accountable. Its members have filed complaints over books about the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Ruby Bridges, and have demanded Texas Gov. Greg Abbott to pass unspecified laws to protect children and parents. 

Under Minnesota law, a requester’s motives don’t matter, but to Carman, a picture was coming into focus. After she fulfilled the written request for information on board members’ liability insurance, for instance, a group of protesters showed up at a meeting and handed every member an envelope containing a demand for $250,000 in recompense — for what, it was not clear. 

But in a few instances, she got a second round of requests that were identical to the first, except this time they came from a man named Keith Haskell, who identifies himself as an investigator with the National Action Task Force. According to its website, the group is a “decentralized private membership network of concerned Americans [who] have decided that ‘enough is enough’!”  

Taking It To The Enemies! NATF National Action Task Force Investigator in MN takes on schoolboards with $250,00.00 claims and complaints!

— 507PatriotMN (@507Patriot)

Haskell did not reply to a request for comment for this story.

He has appeared before other school boards to argue against mask mandates, insisting in at least one other community that board members’ approval of the requirements “punctures” their legal immunity as elected officials, opening them up to demands such as the ones delivered in Lewiston-Altura. 

The group’s website lists a Washington, D.C., address that corresponds to a company that offers its “virtual office address” for “use on business cards, website, etc.” 

As first reported by the Minnesota politics blog , Haskell was convicted in 2017 of impersonating a police officer after two teens he suspected of shoplifting. 

He raised the topic of school board member liability during remarks he made at a board meeting in Brainerd, a northern resort community. When he refused to stop speaking after the three minutes allotted during the public comment period, the board paused its proceedings. 

“I assure you that not hearing what I have to say tonight and taking it very seriously will be extremely detrimental to your position on this board, to your entire board and you as an individual,” the as saying. 

Haskell also insisted that board members had “pierced the veil of protection” they had as elected officials and were no longer covered by the district’s insurance policies. 

“Obviously, that’s threatening to board members,” says Carman. “It’s bullying.”

The law is very clear about the narrow circumstances in which an individual can sue, and Lewiston-Altura’s board members are not at risk, she says. But the strife is taking its toll.

“Our board members understand this is absolutely not the time, they cannot quit, even though this is incredibly stressful,” Carman adds. “What’s frustrating is none of this has anything to do with educating kids.”

Correction: The response to the Mankato paper’s editorial was in regard to a request for documents by United Patriots for Accountability.

The , authored by Sen. Michele Brooks, R-Mercer, passed the upper chamber in a 28-21 vote along party lines. The legislation, which saw pushback from legislative Democrats, would prohibit schools from requiring kids to get a coronavirus vaccine to attend classes.

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“This legislation is not about the vaccine itself; it is about parental options,” Brooks, whose Senate district has the , said on the floor. “There’s nothing more local than parental options.”

Since the pandemic began, GOP lawmakers have contested statewide mitigation efforts, including shutdowns and masking requirements. Stressing local control, Republicans, who hold the majority in the Legislature, argue that parents should decide what is best for their children — not the government or a lone state official.

Contention over pandemic response even prompted a that curtailed some of the governor’s emergency powers. 

Additional to limit the state’s top public health official have circulated since enacted a mask mandate for in September.

The Wolf administration has no plans to implement a COVID-19 vaccine requirement for K-12 schools, Elizabeth Rementer, a spokesperson for Wolf, told the Capital-Star in an email. Rementer added that the governor opposes the bill prohibiting vaccine mandates for Pennsylvania students, describing it as a “waste of time and taxpayer money.”

“[It] is a distraction from the real issues Pennsylvanians are facing that Republicans should be addressing, namely ending the pandemic by encouraging their constituents to get vaccinated, supporting our workforce, and growing our economy,” Rementer said.

Legislative Democrats said the bill prohibiting vaccine mandates for Pennsylvania students would constrict officials from responding to the pandemic. Others looked to necessary for kids to attend school, including polio, measles, mumps, and rubella.

Brooks, however, said she introduced the bill with the anticipation of a COVID-19 requirement for Pennsylvania students. She also asked her colleagues to consider whether current vaccines required for students to attend school were authorized under emergency use authorization.

“What is curious about this is we don’t have a mandate, so we’re passing a bill to prevent a mandate that we don’t have,” Sen. Anthony Williams, D-Philadelphia, said before the vote. “I don’t understand that.”

is part of States Newsroom, a network of news bureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Pennsylvania Capital-Star maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor John Micek for questions: info@penncapital-star.com. Follow Pennsylvania Capital-Star on and .

In what may be a national first, New Mexico issued a requiring that all school staff receive coronavirus booster shots or submit to weekly testing.

The state was already enforcing a vaccinate-or-test rule for K-12 workers and other state employees, but due to concern surrounding the recently identified Omicron variant, the state announced that it will require school staff to up their immunity with an extra shot of the vaccine by Jan. 17, 2022. 

Booster shots, infectious disease specialists believe, are the against the new strain.

“We recognize the gravity of the situation,” Nora Sackett, press secretary for Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, told ����Ӱ��. “For folks who are fully vaccinated, they are now required to get their booster shot, if they’re eligible.”

As of Nov. 29, 85 percent of school staff had been fully vaccinated, according to the state Public Education Department. K-12 employees who are unvaccinated, or who have two doses but choose not to receive a third, must undergo weekly testing for the virus, she explained. If staff are non-compliant with the testing regimen, individual school districts will decide on repercussions. 

Only about 9 percent of school staff reported having received a booster shot as of Dec. 7, meaning the vast majority of vaccinated K-12 employees still must submit documentation of a third dose by Jan. 17 in order to avoid the state’s weekly testing regimen.

Outside of schools, the order requires third doses with no testing opt-out for New Mexico’s health care workers. It’s the first booster mandate in the nation that the data team behind the has identified.

“We haven’t seen it anywhere else,” Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche told ����Ӱ��. 

While numerous districts, including Chicago, gave teachers a day off to get their third shots, he said, “we have not seen [boosters] mandated until we saw it in New Mexico.” 

Sackett, also, said she was not aware of any other states having such a policy on the books.

The published by the governor’s office includes multiple paragraphs outlining the threats posed by the Omicron variant, which seem to have motivated the announcement.  The new COVID strain has been detected in at least , with cases continuing to increase, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. 

In late November, the World Health Organization named the Omicron strain a “variant of concern” just days after it was first identified. Its high number of mutations — including more than the Delta strain on the protein used to latch onto cells — raises alarm for officials. But scientists have yet to determine whether the new version of the virus is indeed more transmissible or better able to evade the protections provided by existing vaccines. More clarity will arrive in the , experts say. For now, the Delta variant remains the dominant coronavirus strain in the U.S. and is responsible for the vast majority of cases, hospitalizations and deaths.

The CDC last Monday on booster doses to recommend that all adults “should,” rather than “may,” receive a third shot six months after their second. A day later, Pfizer CEO and Chairman Albert Bourla announced that his pharmaceutical company from the Food and Drug Administration to extend eligibility for third doses to 16- and 17-year olds.

Alarm over possible threats from the Omicron strain may be translating into more demand for coronavirus immunizations. On Thursday, nearly doses were administered, according to CDC data, a level not seen since late May.

It remains unclear, however, who exactly has been rolling up their sleeves. Counts published by the American Academy of Pediatrics indicate that the number of youth getting vaccinated against the coronavirus had in the seven-day period ending Dec. 1, but the nationwide spike in doses has mostly come after that window.

On Thursday, President Joe Biden announced a spate of new policies designed to enhance school safety and boost youth vaccination rates. He introduced measures including the and a requirement that Medicaid pay health care providers for vaccine consultations with families. 

“​​We’re going to fight this variant with science and speed, not chaos and confusion,” said the president.

Biden also indicated that the CDC would soon release updated guidance on “test-to-stay” programs for schools that allow students potentially exposed to the virus to avoid quarantine if they test negative before the school day. This fall, the practice has grown increasingly popular nationwide as schools seek to keep healthy students learning in person. Test-to-stay schemes would likely expand further should the federal government recommend their implementation.

In California, the state that so far has taken the most aggressive approach to vaccinating its public school students, a federal appeals court on Sunday delivered a win to San Diego Unified School District, against the implementation of its student COVID immunization mandate. Students 16 and up in the state’s second-largest school system will have until Dec. 20 to receive their second vaccine doses if they wish to attend school in person after Jan. 24, when the policy is set to take effect. 

“This latest decision recognizes that we have both the responsibility to protect students and the authority to do so by implementing a vaccine mandate, which is really our best hope as a country to get this deadly disease under control,” Board President Richard Barrera said in a statement.

The case, however, may be ongoing according to Paul Jonna, the attorney representing the lawsuit’s plaintiff, a 16-year-old high school junior who sued the district over its mandate in October, citing religious objections.

“We will seek emergency relief from the U.S. Supreme Court as soon as possible,” Jonna said in a statement.

More than eligible San Diego students are fully vaccinated, the San Diego Union-Tribune reports. 

Just north in Los Angeles, where a student immunization rule will also soon go into effect, the district published figures Nov. 22 showing that of eligible youth had received at least one coronavirus shot or were medically exempt. L.A. Unified’s mandate applies to all students ages 12 and up.

California is also the only state in the nation to adopt a statewide student COVID mandate, which will likely kick in next school year. But already, a small district in San Diego County has said that it will allow unvaccinated students to continue learning in separate, off-campus buildings, .

“For whatever reason, if the parent chooses not to vaccinate [their child], I still believe that a student deserves every opportunity to reach their potential,” schools Superintendent Rich Newman said.

On the other side of the country, New York City will up the stakes on vaccination even for its youngest residents, requiring restaurants and movie theaters by Dec. 14 to of children ages 5 to 11, Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Monday.

Back in New Mexico, bracing for the possible threats of the Omicron variant, acting Health Secretary David Scrase shared his reasoning on the state’s new booster requirement.

“New Mexico isn’t an island,” he said, “and we can’t prevent the new variant from arriving here. So we must defend ourselves with the tools we know to work.”

The cases arrive as schools have become a culture war flashpoint in a nation divided over its pandemic response and reckonings with racism past and present.

Classroom coronavirus safety measures such as masking requirements and teacher vaccine mandates have , and in some cases, even violence — with reports of .

Meanwhile, local school boards have become the of superheated debates over the perceived encroachment of critical race theory into U.S. curricula, spurring conservative takeovers that have led to the departure of .

Tensions have escalated so high that the National School Board Association urged the Biden administration to protect school leaders who faced “an immediate threat” from what they called “domestic terrorism.” The group on Friday for the letter’s strong language, but their initial message was enough to prompt the U.S. Department of Justice to mobilize the Federal Bureau of Investigation and U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to combat the spike in harassment.

With the politics of school policymaking red hot, here are three key upcoming education cases to watch:

1 ACLU sues Oklahoma over its CRT teaching ban, arguing the law restricts educators’ and students’ free speech

On Oct. 19, a group of educators and civil rights groups — backed by the American Civil Liberties Union and ACLU of Oklahoma — challenging an ​​Oklahoma rule that restricts public school teachings on race and gender issues.

The organizations allege that violates students’ and teachers’ right to free speech, tamping down on classroom discussions of race and gender for political motives. The suit also argues that the state has committed a 14th Amendment violation, because the legislation is so vague that it places teachers’ jobs in jeopardy if they misunderstand its clauses.

The Oklahoma law, which took effect in May, prohibits classroom activities that would make a student feel “by virtue of his or her race or sex, (he or she) bears responsibility for actions committed in the past.” Observers described the rule as an “.”

Though the bill text does not expressly mention critical race theory, the state legislature quickly took up and passed the law while a wave of similar legislation swept through Republican-held statehouses nationwide, some of which did explicitly prohibit CRT.

Critical race theory is not an ideology, experts have previously told ����Ӱ��, but a scholarly framework that views racism and inequality as ingrained in law and society. However, right-wing politicians and pundits frequently use the phrase as a catch-all term for any classroom content dealing with race.

As a result of the law’s approval, according to the ACLU, school districts in the state have told teachers to avoid using terms such as “diversity” and “white privilege” in their classrooms, and have removed To Kill a Mockingbird, Raisin in the Sun and other seminal books from reading lists.

Because a total of , the Oklahoma lawsuit could prove the first of many challenges to curricular prohibitions, legal experts say, providing a bellwether for future cases.

2 Parent claims discrimination against the unvaccinated as Los Angeles mandates COVID-19 shots for eligible students

On Oct. 8, the Los Angeles Unified School District was for its requirement that students eligible to receive coronavirus shots be vaccinated in order to attend school in person.

The parent, who was not named in the suit, alleged that COVID immunizations are too new to be mandated for young people, and that the district’s policy discriminates against unvaccinated children by denying them the right to an equal education.

Students ages 12 and up in the nation’s second-largest district must be fully immunized by Dec. 19, according to LAUSD policy. Those who fail to comply will need to enroll in an online schooling alternative called independent study to remain in the school system.

Just down the coast in San Diego, a parallel lawsuit with near-identical language and prepared by the same law firm was also against the 121,000-student district, which requires students 16 and up to receive shots by Dec. 20.

Other California school systems and Culver City, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey, have also instituted COVID vaccine mandates for eligible students, and Washington, D.C. is . In early October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that coronavirus vaccines will be required for all eligible students in the state, though the rule will .

The twin cases will provide a litmus test for whether student vaccine mandates, which legal experts have told ����Ӱ�� may be vulnerable to lawsuits, hold up in court — all while shots for even younger children, ages 5 to 11, are on the verge of authorization.

3 Texas top court halts San Antonio teacher coronavirus vaccine mandate, case moves to Fourth Court of Appeals 

Hours before a teacher COVID vaccine mandate was set to take effect in San Antonio, the Texas Supreme Court issued an opinion Oct. 14 that the district’s policy, delivering a brief win to Gov. Greg Abbott, who has in the state via executive order.

A more final ruling on the state’s request for an injunction against the mandate will soon come from the Fourth Court of Appeals in San Antonio. The Texas Supreme Court , in the words of its authors, was issued only to “preserve the status quo” until the appeals court settles the matter.

School districts across the country have enacted coronavirus vaccine requirements for school staff, including over one-third of the nation’s 500 largest school systems, but San Antonio Independent School District is the only Texas district so far to attempt such a policy in opposition to Abbott’s ban.

What the appeals court decides regarding San Antonio’s rule may prove an arbiter of whether blue cities in hyper-red states will be allowed to follow through on implementing their chosen COVID safety measures amid opposition from state lawmakers.

With the vast majority of U.S. students once again learning in classrooms, 180 of the largest 500 U.S. school districts have enacted requirements for their staff to be vaccinated against COVID-19, according to an analysis published Monday by Burbio, an organization that has tracked school safety policies through the pandemic.

It’s a safety measure that health experts say represents a key step toward improved coronavirus safety in school — especially as younger students remain ineligible for shots likely until November. Although children rarely fall seriously ill from the virus, young people still make up of new cases in the U.S. and school-based outbreaks have triggered some already in 2021-22.

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“Most pediatricians that I’ve spoken with … absolutely support vaccine mandates for teachers,” Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine, told ����Ӱ��. “It’s the right thing to do.”

In 11 states, coronavirus vaccines are mandated for teachers statewide, the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education reports, meaning a considerable share of the 180 districts with staff mandates enacted such policies because state law required it.

Still, vaccination rules , with some mandates having already kicked in and others not taking effect until next month.

Some school systems have more lenient policies, such as Philadelphia, which acknowledged that unvaccinated teachers , though they will be subject to twice-weekly testing. Others impose stricter sanctions, like New York City, which is barring unvaccinated teachers from entering school buildings and putting them on unpaid leave until they get the shot.

Even those districts where staff have a choice between vaccination or regular testing are included in the 36 percent tally, Burbio co-founder Dennis Roche confirmed to ����Ӱ��.

The New York City mandate, which took effect Oct. 4 after a brief legal challenge, applies to roughly 150,000 people who work in the nation’s largest school system, and of employees to receive their shots in the weeks before the rule took effect. Some 96 percent of teachers in the district have now been immunized against COVID-19, The New York Times reported.

By contrast, Los Angeles, the country’s second-largest school system, on Monday extended its deadline for employees to receive their shots from Oct. 15 to Nov. 15, fearing that strict enforcement would . Unlike the New York City mandate, the L.A. rule requires two doses before the deadline for educators receiving the Moderna or Pfizer vaccine.

While many teacher mandates are in deep blue states, the San Antonio Independent School District has an immunization requirement set to go into effect Oct. 15. Earlier this month, the district’s rule from Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton when a county judge denied the state’s motion to secure a temporary injunction on the mandate. A ruling on the policy from a higher court is .

Meanwhile, on Monday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott issued an executive order banning all COVID-19 vaccine mandates in the state, .

“We are reviewing the new executive order and consulting with our legal counsel and Board of Trustees to determine how the district will proceed with its employee vaccine mandate,” a San Antonio ISD spokesperson wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��.

In lieu of mandates, other Texas districts are providing cash incentives for teachers who roll up their sleeves. , and each deliver $500 bonuses to fully vaccinated educators.

Vaccine mandates for students remain much more rare, with only a select few districts having implemented such rules. California districts Los Angeles, Oakland and Culver City as well as Hoboken, New Jersey have each made immunization a requirement for in-person school for vaccine-eligible students, with deadlines in the coming months. Washington, D.C. is .

In early October, California Gov. Gavin Newsom announced that coronavirus vaccines will be required for all eligible students in the state, though the rule will .

Burbio’s count that 36 percent of top districts require teachers to be immunized comes as the rush to embrace such policies has slowed considerably. After eight states moved to enact educator mandates in late August and early September, only one — Delaware — has added a similar rule since then, CRPE reports.

But even as COVID case counts , Deeter, the pediatrics professor, warns that now is not time for the country to let down its guard.

“As the surge goes down … now everybody’s like ‘Yay! [The pandemic] is over.’ It’s not over. It’s not even close to over. We are just prepping for the next wave,” she said. “We have to prepare.”

As all of our nation’s schools have reopened for the new year, and many communities continue to face rising infections, one of the best defenses against school disruptions may also be one of the least contentious: .

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Testing can complement masking, vaccination requirements and proactive parent communication, and it can help schools while minimizing quarantines.

But our review of 100 large and urban school systems suggests many districts are not systematically taking advantage of this critical tool.

About half the districts in our review either mandate regular testing or rely on optional testing to identify new cases, with 37 requiring testing for staff and 14 for students.

Eight districts require staff to undergo testing, usually weekly, even if they are vaccinated. Twenty-nine require testing for some staff members, such as those who are unvaccinated. Another 29 districts offer optional testing for staff.

While student testing mandates in New York and Los Angeles grabbed headlines when school resumed, such requirements remain uncommon in the rest of the country.

Four districts in our review, including L.A. Unified, require all students to undergo regular COVID screening. Ten districts require some to undergo preventative testing, such as children who are unvaccinated or play sports. at least 10 percent of students each week, targeting unvaccinated kids.

Test-to-stay is a new tool aimed to shorten quarantine time

Testing can help administrators detect COVID infections before they spread in schools, while limiting the number of students who have to quarantine. Every district we track has now clarified its quarantine policy, and a growing number offer exemptions to students who take other precautions to safeguard against the spread of the virus.

Of the 100 districts we review, 86 exempt vaccinated students from quarantine, with 69 specifying that the exemption applies if they do not show symptoms. Other exemptions include students who recently recovered from COVID (37) and exposed students wearing masks (29).

Districts are increasingly turning to testing to limit quarantines. A little more than half of districts in our review (53) allow students who test negative for the virus to shorten or avoid isolation.

A few districts (8), in an attempt to keep more students learning in-person, are modifying their approach to quarantine using a test-to-stay program. These policies allow students who may have been exposed to the virus to continue in-person learning as long as they take daily COVID-19 tests.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has not yet approved the test-to-stay approach and continues to recommend quarantine for up to 14 days for certain students. The federal public health agency told The New York Times but is working with local jurisdictions to collect more information on the strategy and its execution.

A handful of states, including , , and , have now outlined test-to-stay protocols or similar rules that let schools use testing to ease quarantine requirements. Seven of the eight districts with test-to-stay policies are located in these states. Portland Public Schools, in Maine, is the only district in our review administering a test-to-stay program without state guidance.

In other cases, state policies might prevent districts from adding nuance to their quarantine policies. asks students or staff who are under quarantine to stay home for 14 days after their last exposure to an infected person, monitor for symptoms and seek testing. A negative test does not shorten the length of time a student has to quarantine.

Testing may be an especially valuable tool in states that limit other health precautions, like Florida and Texas, whose governors have banned mask mandates, or Montana, which passed legislation that .

More districts signal vaccination requirements, but lack clarity on enforcement

Following the Biden administration’s recent, sweeping mandates for federal workers and businesses, a few more districts are following suit, with 40 in our review now requiring staff vaccinations. Of those, 14 require all staff members to get vaccinated without a testing alternative. This is double the number of districts with vaccine mandates a month earlier, but it is far outpaced by the growing number that allow staff to opt out through regular testing.

San Antonio ISD became the first district in Texas to require staff vaccinations, a decision that .

Meanwhile, 26 districts now require staff to either get vaccinated or participate in weekly testing. The School District of Philadelphia requires unvaccinated staff to get tested twice a week.

L.A. Unified and the Oakland Unified School District remain the ones that require vaccinations for all eligible students. Another California district, San Diego Unified, for students over 16. Eight districts require student athletes to get vaccinated.

As early as January, all eligible K-12 students in California will be required to get the vaccine. Gov. Gavin Newsom issued the nation’s first statewide mandate on Friday. 

State, federal leadership needed to help districts take advantage of testing

District leaders face the critical work of protecting students’ health, keeping them learning in classrooms wherever possible and helping them recover from the academic and emotional toll of the pandemic. They cannot afford to waste precious time and attention battling state officials or teachers unions over health precautions. Nor can students afford to have this school year interrupted by excessive quarantines.

Testing can be a valuable tool for catching outbreaks early in schools. It can work in concert with masking, vaccination and quarantines — or provide critical protections in districts where political barriers are blocking these crucial health precautions. And research suggests it can provide a safe, effective way to while guarding against infections in schools.

State and federal leaders should enact guidance that helps districts make the most of this critical tool. State education and health offices must come together to provide the funding, policy guidance and coordination so districts can conduct reliable testing at scale.

Locally, health authorities can pool resources and share protocols. And they should help districts find creative ways to overcome one of the biggest logistical barriers to robust COVID testing programs: a lack of staff. As one district official in Texas told The Times, “.” That army could include parent volunteers, school system workers, employees from community organizations or personnel from local health agencies.

There is still much we don’t know about the barriers preventing schools from implementing effective COVID testing programs. Until more districts start enacting testing programs and talking openly about the operational barriers, it may not be clear exactly what states, health agencies and community volunteers can do to help.

Bree Dusseault is principal at the Center on Reinventing Public Education, supporting its analysis of district and charter responses to COVID-19. She previously served as executive director of Green Dot Public Schools Washington, executive director of pK-12 schools for Seattle Public Schools, a researcher at CRPE, and as a principal and teacher. Christine Pitts is a resident policy fellow at the Center on Reinventing Public Education.

Pfizer-BioNTech has submitted initial data to the Food and Drug Administration that its COVID-19 vaccine is safe and effective for 5- to 11-year olds, the pharmaceutical company Tuesday.

The development represents another key step toward shots for young children, but Pfizer has yet to formally submit a request to the FDA for authorization to inoculate the roughly Americans under 12 years old, which it must do before the federal agency can fully begin the weeks-long review process.

Though younger children are not yet cleared for the vaccine, California Gov. Gavin Newsom on Friday ordered COVID shots for all eligible K-12 students in the state, marking the first such statewide move in the nation. The mandate but depends on when vaccines receive full FDA approval for young people ages 12 and up, the Los Angeles Times reports. Currently, Pfizer shots have full FDA approval for use in individuals 16 or older.

“This is just another vaccine,” Newsom said. Coronavirus shots will be added to “a well-established list that currently includes 10 vaccines and well-established rules and regulations that have been advanced by the Legislature for decades.”

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Pfizer’s submission for emergency use authorization among kids under 12 will come , CEO Albert Bourla told ABC News on Sunday.

If Bourla’s company sticks to that timeline, young kids should have access to COVID shots before the end of next month, said Dr. Anthony Fauci.

“I would imagine in the next few weeks [the FDA] will examine that data and hopefully give the OK so we can start vaccinating children hopefully by the end of October,” the nation’s top infectious disease expert told MSNBC’s Morning Joe.

An anonymous source familiar with the authorization process, however, told The Wall Street Journal that if Pfizer delays its submission to the FDA, clearance for young children to receive shots

Either way, it’s big news for schools, says Atlanta-based pediatrician Jennifer Shu. Though classrooms have not proven to be the locus of viral spread through the pandemic, circulation of the highly contagious Delta variant this fall has spurred outbreaks forcing some already since buildings opened. In late September, minors made up , the American Academy of Pediatrics reports, though the risk of severe outcomes remains small, doctors say.

“Once kids ages 5 to 11 are eligible for [the] vaccine, attending school during the pandemic will be safer,” Shu wrote in a message to ����Ӱ��.

The Pfizer data included 2,268 participants ages 5 to 11 who were each given a two-dose regimen of the vaccine 21 days apart. Children were given a 10 microgram dose, smaller than the 30 micrograms administered to older children and adults, which the drug company said was a carefully selected dosage for safety, tolerability and effectiveness.

In an internal review of the results last week, Pfizer reported that one month after the second dose, the shots produced a “robust” antibody response, including immunity and side effects comparable to that delivered by the larger dose in 16- to 25-year-old patients.

The FDA said that it will analyze those data as soon as possible, the .

In the Atlanta pediatrician’s practice, patients are eager to have youngsters inoculated — though Shu’s clientele may be the exception, from a nationwide perspective.

“I’m mostly seeing families that are all in,” she said. “​​Children are telling me they can’t wait until they can get the vaccine, since they are often the only ones in their family who haven’t even gotten one dose yet.”

Youth ages 12 and up have been eligible for doses since May, but , according to the AAP. By that measure, inoculating those under 12 years old may prove a challenge.

A Kaiser Family Foundation national poll from mid-August found that only of 5- to 11-year olds would want their child to receive the COVID-19 shot right away after it’s cleared, while another 40 percent said they would “wait and see.” That attitude may be changing, however, as of U.S. parents surveyed in a Gallup poll published Tuesday indicated that they would have their children inoculated against COVID-19 if shots were available.

Getting children under 12 vaccinated “will be an uphill battle,” Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, told ����Ӱ��. “I think parents are even more protective of their younger kids (than their older children).”

In the Kaiser survey, an additional 9 percent of parents said they would get their youngsters vaccinated only if the shots were required. Meanwhile, momentum is building for schools to do just that.

Last week, Oakland Unified School District in California joined Golden State counterparts Los Angeles and Culver City, as well as Hoboken, New Jersey, in in order to attend in-person school.

Los Angeles Unified School District officials chose not to comment when asked by ����Ӱ�� last week whether they would extend their student vaccine requirement to learners ages 5 to 11, should shots be approved for that age group.

Whether or not student vaccination mandates continue to expand, Shu believes the real-world outcomes from COVID shots should encourage parents who may be on the fence.

“More than 5.5 billion doses of COVID vaccine have been given worldwide,” she points out. “I hope that builds confidence for parents to give it to their children.”

In a highly unusual move, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Dr. Rochelle Walensky on Friday overruled a recommendation delivered by an advisory panel of her agency — paving the way for teachers to receive booster shots of the Pfizer-BioNTech coronavirus vaccine.

Teachers and other school workers inoculated with the Pfizer vaccine may now receive third doses at least six months after receiving their second shot. Those under 65 years old should make their decision based on the “individual benefits and risks,” the CDC said.

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“If … you’re a frontline worker, like a health care worker or a teacher, you can get a free booster now,” said President Joe Biden in remarks on Friday.

In addition to essential workers, senior citizens and adults with underlying health conditions are also eligible, meaning a total of some 60 million Americans will soon have access to third doses, including 20 million already eligible because six months have elapsed since their second Pfizer shot.

Walensky’s decision comes as the final play in a days-long drama between the Food and Drug Administration, which on Wednesday in their list of groups recommended for boosters, and the CDC, whose Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices voted on Thursday to leave those in high-exposure occupations off the list.

The CDC director then broke with her agency’s recommendation early Friday morning, endorsing third doses for those working in high-risk fields.

“As CDC Director, it is my job to recognize where our actions can have the greatest impact,” Walensky said in a . “I believe we can best serve the nation’s public health needs by providing booster doses for the elderly, those in long-term care facilities, people with underlying medical conditions, and for adults at high risk of disease from occupational and institutional exposures to COVID-19.”

But while some educators may soon line up for third doses, others are resistant to even get their first or second shot.

An Education Week survey from the summer found that of teachers nationwide do not intend to get vaccinated, while 87 percent reported that they had already been immunized. More recently, a Sept. 24 poll from the American Federation of Teachers found that and that 67 percent favor a vaccine requirement for all school staff. The exact nationwide totals of vaccinated school personnel remain unclear.

In New York City, where teachers had been expected to provide proof of vaccination by Monday, Sept. 27, many schools have dozens of teachers who have not yet complied with the mandate, including some sites with up to 100 staff without proof of immunization, said Mark Cannizzaro, president of the Council of School Supervisors and Administrators, in a Friday press conference.

“Principals and superintendents have been reaching out consistently to tell us that they are concerned about not having enough staff come Tuesday morning, Sept. 28,” he said.

A federal appeals court judge on Friday New York City’s vaccine mandate for Department of Education staff, delaying its enforcement. But late Monday, the federal court Chalkbeat reported, clearing the way for the city to require staff to provide proof of vaccination or be placed on unpaid leave.

Alongside New York City, Los Angeles and Chicago, the second- and third-largest districts in the country, are also requiring teachers to be immunized without providing regular testing as an alternative. The same is true for Washington, Oregon and the District of Columbia. Seven other states require educators to choose between COVID vaccination or regularly undergoing testing for the virus, according to an EdWeek .

But even where mandates are supposedly in place, , meaning that many unvaccinated teachers remain in the classroom, often teaching students who themselves are not yet eligible for shots. Students aged 12 and up are authorized for COVID vaccines, and children aged 5 to 11 may gain access by Halloween.

Further still, data from the University of Washington’s Center on Reinventing Public Education show that the majority of school districts do not require teachers to be vaccinated, said Director Robin Lake.

“That is a major unresolved problem,” she wrote in an email to ����Ӱ��. “Why do we keep giving teachers priority access to the vaccine without requiring they all do their part to protect kids?”

President Biden urged the more than 70 million Americans eligible for shots who have still not received immunizations to reconsider their choice.

“We have the tools to beat COVID-19,” he said. “Get vaccinated.”

In a pivotal development for school coronavirus safety, Pfizer-BioNTech announced Monday that its vaccine was for children ages 5 to 11 in trials.

These are the first such results for this age group in the U.S., and data have not yet been peer-reviewed or submitted to the Food and Drug Administration for emergency use authorization. The pharmaceutical company plans to apply for approval to use the shot in children , the New York Times reports, meaning that millions of 5- to 11-year-olds could be inoculated before Halloween if the regulatory review goes as smoothly for this age group as it did for adolescents.

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The trial included 2,268 participants ages 5 to 11 who were each given a two-dose regimen of the vaccine 21 days apart. Children were given a 10 microgram dose, smaller than the 30 micrograms administered to older children and adults, which the drug company said was a carefully selected dosage for safety, tolerability and effectiveness.

One month after the second dose, the shots produced an immune response and side effects comparable to that delivered by the larger dose in 16- to 25-year-old patients, Pfizer said. A company spokesperson confirmed to CNN that there were in the trial, a type of heart inflammation that has been linked with mRNA vaccines in boys and young men.

The results come at a pivotal time, as children now make up and as the highly contagious Delta variant has sent more children into hospitals in the past few weeks than at any other point in the pandemic.

“Since July, pediatric cases of COVID-19 have risen by about 240 percent in the U.S. — underscoring the public health need for vaccination. These trial results provide a strong foundation for seeking authorization of our vaccine for children 5 to 11 years old, and we plan to submit them to the FDA and other regulators with urgency,” said Albert Bourla, Pfizer’s chairman and CEO.

The trial results are a hopeful indication that shots will be available for young children before the winter months, when low temperatures complicate outdoor activities and ventilation across much of the country.

“We are pleased to be able to submit data to regulatory authorities for this group of school-aged children before the start of the winter season,” said Dr. Ugur Sahin, BioNTech’s CEO and co-founder.

​​Pfizer said it is expecting to release trial data for children as young as 6 months “as soon as the fourth quarter of this year.”

Already in the first weeks of the school year, tens of thousands of students have been forced out of class due to infection or exposure to the virus, oftentimes with sparse learning opportunities while they self-isolate. In Mississippi, where the state does not require that masks be worn in school, more than in just one week and over 20,000 students and staff were in quarantine.

Even as quarantines stack up, worst-case outcomes among healthy children — like chronic illness or death — still remain “vanishingly rare,” health experts told ����Ӱ�� earlier this month.

But with schools across the country scrambling to regularly test their student bodies as a screening measure against viral spread, the now-likely approval of shots for elementary schoolers before the winter may provide an alternate route for mitigation, and could open the door for more widespread COVID vaccine mandates for students in school.

Earlier this month, Los Angeles Unified became the country’s first major school district to require student vaccinations with a rule dangling full vaccination by the winter holidays as a necessary step to remain learning in person for students 12 and up. Culver City, California and Hoboken, New Jersey made similar moves in late August.

LAUSD officials chose not to comment when asked by ����Ӱ�� whether they would extend their student vaccine requirement to learners ages 5 to 11, should shots be approved for that age group.

In late August, the FDA gave full authorization to coronavirus shots for individuals ages 16 and up. Health experts are mixed on whether schools should mandate that 12- to 15-year-old students, who are currently approved for doses under emergency use authorization, receive the vaccine, according to interviews ����Ӱ�� conducted in early September.

Authorization of shots for younger learners “starts to open the door” for wider student vaccine requirements, Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University, told ����Ӱ��.

“We can and do mandate vaccines (like shots protecting against measles, mumps and rubella) for students all over the place, every day in this country,” he said. “We should treat [the COVID shot] like we treat all vaccines.”

Without mandates, districts may have trouble persuading their younger children to get immunized. Though youth ages 12 and up have been eligible for doses since May, only 43 percent of 12- to 17-year-olds are fully vaccinated, according to the American Academy of Pediatrics. After a high of 1.6 million pediatric vaccinations per week in late May, the rate has since fallen to 273,000 weekly doses in mid-September.

“It’s going to be an uphill battle addressing [vaccine] hesitancy in schools,” said Linas.

Learn more about the vaccine results for 5- to 11-year-olds here:

And then came the Delta variant.

Pediatric coronavirus cases have now surged above 250,000 for the first time since the start of the pandemic, according to . Hospitalizations of children stricken by the highly transmissible strain are reaching and some of students across the country last week were quarantining away from schools that had just barely begun. With a swiftness that surprised even health experts, the virus has across some 278 districts in 35 states, according to the website Burbio, a data service that tracks school calendars.

As for the adults in schools, at least have died of the virus since mid-August and shut down all its schools earlier this month after two teachers perished in the same week.

The Delta drumbeat of distress is one of the main reasons that President Joe Biden came out Thursday with a new plan of attack, including mandatory vaccinations for some 300,000 school staff members working for federal programs, such as Head Start or schools operated by the Bureau of Indian Education, and grants for districts confronting loss of funding for implementing mask mandates.

It will take some time to tell if Biden’s new strategy will be successful in beating back this latest surge. Right now, many parents and school officials are in a state of anxiety about how to keep their K-12 communities safe and perhaps questioning whether they miscalculated the strength of the COVID-19 enemy.

Complicating the matter further, decisions to implement basic virus mitigation measures in school have in some cases exploded into or even .

Amid the uncertainty and high tensions, and with , ����Ӱ�� spoke directly to health experts for clarity on how to understand the virus in this critical stage and tips on how to safely navigate the back-to-school season.

Here’s what they had to say:

1 We’ve seen a surge in pediatric coronavirus cases. Should we abandon the prior wisdom that kids rarely catch COVID, and when they do, it’s not too serious?

Not exactly.

“[The Delta variant] is more infectious, but it’s not a whole new game,” explained Benjamin Linas, professor of medicine at Boston University.

The variant’s high transmissibility has pushed up case counts, including among children, he told ����Ӱ��. But serious illness among young people remains “vanishingly rare,” he said — citing a case fatality rate of .00003 for those under 20.

“This underlying reality that kids are at far less risk of severe COVID-19 than adults remains true, even with Delta.”

Young people do represent a larger share of infections nationwide now than they did at the outset of the pandemic. But that’s likely because far fewer minors than adults are vaccinated, and many remain ineligible for shots, said Kristina Deeter, professor of pediatric medicine at University of Nevada, Reno School of Medicine.

In most cases, “[kids] are not as sick as the adults,” she agreed.

Still, Rebecca Wurtz, professor of health policy at the University of Minnesota, cautions that the risk of infection remains high, particularly for the unvaccinated. The idea that young people couldn’t catch or spread COVID was always silly, she told ����Ӱ��, and the Delta variant means that transmission is now easier than ever before.

“Delta will find you if you are not thoughtfully masking and social distancing,” she said.

2 Does the Delta variant make kids sicker than previous strains?

There is no conclusive evidence that it does, according to the experts.

“The jury’s still out,” said Deeter.

Studies from Canada and Scotland have found that than those infected with previous mutations of the virus.

And while those papers don’t examine virulence specifically among young people, Wurtz believes it could still be “reasonable to extrapolate that to kids.”

Evidence from the U.S., however, seems to contradict the idea that Delta causes more severe infections among youth. Even as pediatric COVID cases have surged, the proportion of children and adolescents hospitalized with severe disease has , points out Amruta Padhye, pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Missouri.

The hospitalization rate among unvaccinated adolescents was , recent CDC data reveal.

3 After the Pfizer vaccine’s full approval from the FDA, parents may now theoretically seek “off-label” vaccines for children under 12. Should they do so?

In short, no.

Although the FDA’s full approval of the Pfizer vaccine for those 16 and up means that doctors now have the power to prescribe the shot “” to any individual regardless of age, it would be irresponsible to do so, said Deeter.

The biggest unknown, she explained, is dosage. She prescribes drugs off label every day as a pediatrician, but explained that the COVID vaccine is different because it’s still so new.

“I don’t feel safe even deciding on what dose I might want to prescribe for a child. I have no idea what’s going to work,” she said, explaining that too much vaccine could elevate risks such as myocarditis, already more prevalent in young vaccine recipients than adults, and too little vaccine might not provide adequate protection against the coronavirus.

“There’s a reason that we have the approval process, even in the middle of a crisis,” added Linas. “I don’t recommend going out to get your child vaccinated before the vaccine has actually been approved or emergency authorized for kids.”

Youngsters aged 5 to 11 are expected to become eligible for coronavirus shots , experts say. The process has stretched out over months in part due to federal health regulators efforts to bolster confidence in the shots by in clinical trials.

Once shots are approved for that age group, they will be the most effective way to keep children healthy, said Linas.

“With the vaccine, you’re very well protected from the bad outcomes.”

4 Should schools implement vaccine mandates for staff?

Immunization requirements for school staff have multiplied since the FDA issued full approval for the Pfizer vaccine. ​, , and multiple other states have enacted rules requiring educators to receive the COVID shot or be regularly tested for the virus.

In his Thursday address, which unveiled new vaccination rules covering two-thirds of all U.S. workers, President Biden to help move the needle on teacher immunization from its reported 90 percent level up to 100 percent.

“Vaccination requirements in schools are nothing new,” said the president.

Expecting teachers to be immunized against COVID represents a sound public health policy, says Linas.

“It’s reasonable for school districts … to say to their educators and staff… ‘We have an expectation that if you’re going to come into our buildings where we have our unvaccinated children, we expect you to be vaccinated. And if you won’t do that, then I’m sorry, you can’t teach.’”

That strategy also minimizes learning disruptions, pointed out Janet Englund, professor of pediatrics at the University of Washington School of Medicine.

“When a teacher gets sick, he or she is unable to perform his or her job,” she told ����Ӱ��.

5 What about vaccine mandates for students?

Very few school districts have extended vaccine mandates to students, as 12- to 15-year-olds remain eligible for shots only on an emergency authorization basis, and those under 12 are still ineligible.

On Thursday, however, Los Angeles Unified School District, which serves 600,000 students, became the first major U.S. school district to require that eligible students attending school in person be fully vaccinated against the coronavirus. Students 12 and older in the nation’s second-largest school system will have to receive their second dose of the shot by Dec. 19, officials announced.

Culver City, California and also instituted similar requirements for students in late August. Experts told ����Ӱ�� that they expect the vaccination rules to face legal challenges.

Although Englund said she is a believer in many student vaccine mandates — they helped control diseases such as measles and polio, she pointed out — requiring a vaccine that is approved only on an emergency use authorization may be premature.

“It’s not quite time,” she said.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, however, expressed his while speaking on CNN in late August, and the University of Minnesota’s Wurtz told ����Ӱ�� that she is “absolutely in favor of mandatory vaccinations for students,” due to the high safety and efficacy of COVID shots.

6 How effective are masks and other safety mitigation measures at slowing the spread of COVID in school?

Experts agree that safety measures to slow the spread of COVID are more effective when implemented in tandem with multiple others than on their own.

“[Masking] has to be a part of a layered protection strategy,” UCLA professor of pediatrics Ishminder Kaur told ����Ӱ��.

That means that classrooms should employ all strategies available to them, she said: universal masking, ventilation, distancing, outdoor activities and rigorous testing to keep infected students out of the classroom.

Doing so can result in schools effectively containing the virus and keeping case rates below those of surrounding communities, academic studies show.

Although quarantining students exposed to the virus can disrupt academics, experts said it is a necessary step to contain transmission. They pointed out that with widespread access to testing, a negative result after five days may allow students to return to the classroom more quickly. On Thursday, Biden announced that the White House will move to make 280 million rapid and at-home tests available using the Defense Production Act and lower the cost of over-the-counter tests from Walmart, Kroger and Amazon.

Some districts’ quarantine protocols are more stringent than those recommended by the CDC, according to a recent survey of 100 districts from the University of Washington’s Center for Reinventing Public Education.

Some observers have recently made the case that the , but Kaur points out that a recent study from Bangladesh with a randomized design — considered the “gold standard” in causal research — finds that , though it cautions that cloth masks may be less effective.

And while masking controversy has turned many school board meetings ugly, including in Broward County, Florida where the board chair said “all hell broke loose” when they required face coverings in defiance of Gov. Ron DeSantis’s order, kids don’t actually seem to mind wearing masks, said Kaur.

“They’re not fidgeting, they’re not touching it,” she said of the youngsters who come into her clinic. “It’s the new normal for them.”

Deeter, who works in a sedation clinic and has to ask kids to remove their masks, has observed the same.

“They get so upset when I try to take it off of them. It’s their buddy,” she said.

7 Outside of school, what’s the best way to navigate playdates and other social activities?

The number one tip, experts say, is to stay outside as much as possible.

“Outdoor activities were not the ones that were spreading these infections, which remains true even for Delta,” said Kaur, although she recommended avoiding overcrowded locations even outside. For example, coaches calling players into a huddle might ask everyone to momentarily mask up.

Even when the weather gets cold, Wurtz recommends limiting indoor hangouts. She suggests some compromises: building a snowman outside then coming indoors for hot chocolate at the end, perhaps.

8 What’s the COVID end-game for schools?

Once all students have had the opportunity to receive COVID vaccinations, it could be time to consider rolling back virus mitigation protocols, Linas said, and beginning the conversation about how to live with a virus that within the global population. But that’s still a long way out.

“We’re not there yet,” he said.

As COVID cases surged across the country this summer, fueled by spread of the highly infectious Delta variant, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined the American Academy of Pediatrics in recommending that all students and staff wear masks in school. But in Texas, as in a handful of other conservative states, an executive order banning mask mandates forbade school districts from following that guidance.

In Dallas, Superintendent Michael Hinojosa felt that he was faced with a choice: risk over 153,000 students’ safety or risk legal challenges. The superintendent chose the latter, defying Gov. Greg Abbott’s ban and paving the way for dozens of other districts in the state to follow the same path.

Now nearly a month into the school year, and as COVID rages through the Dallas community, the struggle is making its way through state courts. And all the while, Hinojosa is contending with the urgent question of how to bring students back up to speed after a year of disrupted learning.

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This year, Dallas is rolling out discipline reforms to end racial disparities in suspension, new social-emotional supports and revamped school calendars to boost students’ learning time.

����Ӱ�� caught up with Hinojosa over the phone to hear how those efforts are unfolding and get the latest on the district’s legal showdown over masks.

This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

����Ӱ��: It’s been a pretty surreal back-to-school season and Dallas has been in the news a lot. What’s top of mind for you right now?

Hinojosa: Last year was a year like no other, and this August has been an August like no other. Even as surreal as last year was, this August has been even crazier.

On Aug. 3, our county went to code red (representing high COVID transmission). The very next day, I’m attending a meeting of some superintendents … and we heard from a very prominent attorney that maybe the governor can’t enforce this (ban on mask mandates). So the Houston superintendent calls me and is telling me they’re thinking about implementing a mask mandate protocol and so I said, “I’m with you.” I really felt it was under my authority, since I have the authority to run the day-to-day operations of the school district.

Aug. 9 we announced our mask protocols, and then everything breaks loose.

I’ve been following along with the legal developments. Dallas ISD’s mask mandate was challenged, and then a judge ruled in your favor. But now the state attorney general has appealed. Can you give me a sense of where you think this whole thing is headed?

Well, it changes almost on a daily basis.

We prevailed at the district court. But the governor (Greg Abbott) and attorney general (Ken Paxton) can appeal to an appeals court and we think we’ll win there. But we think eventually we’re going to lose at the (Texas) Supreme Court … because they’re all conservative members.

It’s very interesting that the attorney general and the governor have both said publicly that they’re going to prosecute anybody who implements a mask protocol. But in the court pleadings, they said that they had no authority to do that. Then the commissioner of education (Mike Morath) has come out and said that they’re not going to enforce anything until all of these court proceedings are over.

So what I predict is that eventually this will go to the Supreme Court and we will be told at some point that we cannot have our mask protocol as we want it. But there’s going to be no enforcement, because I don’t see the local district attorneys coming after all 60 superintendents in Texas that are defying the governor’s executive order.

We’ve said all along, this was temporary. Come November, if we get back under 500 COVID cases in the county and we’ve stopped the spread on campuses, then I’ll be glad to lift the mask mandate. I don’t really like it myself, but we’re trying to protect the health and safety of our students.

As I’m sure you know, the federal government is opening civil rights probes into five states over their ban on mask mandates in schools. Texas isn’t on that list because the issue is already in the hands of the courts. But more broadly, what type of federal involvement might be useful in Texas? And do you see bans on mask mandates as a civil rights issue?

One of the reasons [the U.S. Department of Education] didn’t go after Texas is that they now have the understanding that what the governor has done is unenforceable. So that’s why we weren’t included in that order.

But it could be a civil rights issue. We’ll have to see how that plays out. We do get federal dollars for special education and economically disadvantaged students and, of course, they have given us significant dollars for the Recovery Act. So the feds do have some skin in this game and they’re not just sitting on the sidelines.

Seems like the federal government is trying to find out whether bans on mask mandates systematically exclude specific students, perhaps immunocompromised students from the classroom.

Yeah, that’s the focus of their inquiry, which gives them standing on this matter and, of course, those students are all over the country, so it does give them an entrée, I believe. But I’m not an attorney.

Over the weekend, Dr. Fauci told CNN that school [COVID] vaccine mandates for eligible students are a good idea based on the benefit-to-risk ratio. Schools already require a number of other vaccinations for enrollment and the FDA recently gave full approval to the Pfizer shot for folks 16 and up. What are your thoughts on the topic of mandating student vaccinations?

I’m supportive. I’m not ready to litigate at this time yet. What we’ve done instead to start with is we’re giving a $25 gift card for any student who provides his or her proof of vaccination. So we’re going down that path, we’re going a little bit more slowly (than we did with our mask policy).

But we would be supportive, especially when our younger students can take the vaccine, and we’re now hearing late November, early December when that vaccination will be available. I would be in favor of [a student immunization requirement]. You’re exactly right. We require other vaccines and so I would be very supportive of that, although I’m not going to be as assertive on that one as we have been on the mask protocol.

So just to clarify, when students under 12 do become eligible for shots that might open the door for Dallas to move toward mandating student vaccines? 

Yes, I would definitely consider it at that point because it’d be much more universal.

And for staff vaccine mandates, they’re banned in Texas but have been implemented in a number of states. Do you think making COVID shots mandatory for teachers might be an appropriate public health measure? And how do politics play in?

We have 22,000 employees and so we told them that we would give them a $500 stipend if they prove that they were vaccinated. Within three hours, we had 6,000 staff turn in their documentation. We are now up to around 11,000 and then the ones that just went out and took the vaccine, it takes them a while to get their documentation. So we anticipate we’ll get probably three-quarters on a voluntary basis.

But to answer your question, yes, I would be very supportive, especially for campus employees who deal with children to be required to have a vaccination. But even our county hospital can’t require vaccination in Texas for their nurses because of the state laws that are in place. When San Antonio ISD tried to do that, they got halted by the attorney general.

And in a sentence or two, what’s at stake in these safety decisions for students, families and teachers?

Everything’s at stake here.

Not only their safety, but the data is overwhelming that in-person instruction is by far the best. A few, maybe five percent of the students, do better virtually. But can you imagine if we have to have students at home because [COVID] spread got so bad that they lose another year of instruction? A whole generation could be at risk of falling so far behind that they can’t catch up. So there’s a lot at stake.

We’re very proud that we got to 97 percent of our projected enrollment and out of that, 96 percent of it is in person. So our students are glad to be back. Our families are glad to be back, but boy, we’ve got a big hill to climb academically.

On that topic of catching students up, especially given the fact that more often than not, some of those students who fell furthest behind last year were those who perhaps had fewer supports or financial resources at home, what efforts are underway in Dallas to help kids get back up to speed? I read about a tutoring program, for instance.

Well, we had 36,000 households without connectivity, so we put together a program called Operation Connectivity to connect our families and we executed on that plan. [At first] we did hotspots, but now we put up towers so that at least they can have access if they’re having to learn from home.

We’re also going to have tutoring during the school day, afterschool and in the summer.

But we now have three different calendars. One of them is a year-round calendar, where you get more time. Another one is what we call an intersession calendar, where you go five weeks, and then you’re off a week, go another five weeks, and you go off a week. We catch students up [who are behind during that week off]. For our most challenging schools — we have 60 that we call “high-priority campuses” — we have a very robust afterschool program from 3 to 6 p.m. for enrichment activities and strong academic activities to try to get them caught up.

And we’ve completely reinvented our summer school. So we’re doing all of those things all at the same time to accelerate learning.

Can you tell me a bit more about those different calendars? Where did the idea come from, what’s the goal, and do you know of other districts using that same model?

There’s a school district in the El Paso area called Socorro that has had this intersession calendar ever since the ‘90s and they’ve had good academic results where they bring in the students that are behind during the week that they’re off. Garland ISD, which is one of our neighbors, went to that calendar last year, but there is no other district that has the multiple options that we have.

To be one of the five schools using the year-round calendar or [one of the] 41 schools that are in intersession calendars, each had 80 percent of the teachers and 80 percent of the parents opt into those calendar options. … We didn’t want to force families to take one of those calendars.

At scale, nobody else is doing it like we are, other than the two that I mentioned, Garland and Socorro. So we think that students in those schools they’re going to have a better opportunity to catch up than if you just went with a traditional calendar.

We’re using a lot of our federal ESSA dollars to pay for this extra time. We know who our best teachers are, and our best teachers get more money to teach those intersession opportunities. Instead of working 180 days, they’ll be working 210 days. So there’s significant dollars that will be going into the pockets of our teachers, and especially our best teachers, because they’ll get the opportunity to do a lot of those enrichment and intervention opportunities.

I know last year Dallas moved to end suspensions. Where does that effort now stand?

We’re pulling forward with it. Ten percent of our students are African-American males, yet 51 percent of our suspensions were African-American male, until now. If you [engage in severe misbehavior] you will still be suspended, but we’re talking about the discretionary suspension and the discretionary suspensions were 75 percent of our suspensions. We’re going to have a different alternative on how to redirect their behavior.

We’ll have some data sets at the end of the first nine weeks about where we are and we’ll also have data in a year about how this journey to redirect behavior through these reset centers went. So stay tuned.

We’ll be following those results. Turning to the social-emotional well-being of the wider student population, I know that last fall Dallas ISD teachers were trained in trauma-informed care. What results did you see from that training? How do you see Dallas ISD’s commitment to social-emotional learning changing in response to COVID-19 traumas? 

We got $7 million from the Wallace Foundation to implement social-emotional learning districtwide. They hired the RAND Corporation to do a research study. But we ran into a problem because we couldn’t have a treatment group and a control group. All of our campuses wanted to have that training and so we kind of threw the research out the window.

We trained the teachers first so they could help deal with the students and we also hired 58 mental health and social work professionals last year, knowing that we were going to need them this year. … We just went all in, as many as we could afford.

Last question, what’s sustaining you through the pandemic? Where are you finding positive stories to counterbalance all the tense circumstances?

People don’t want a whiner. They want a problem solver. So if you lose hope and aspiration, then that gives other people permission to lose hope. I’m generally a positive person, I look for solutions.

I’ve had very little pushback on my mask mandate protocol. In fact, I’ve had mostly universal support and so I think that just shows that if you’re willing to take a risk, and look to the future in a positive way that people will climb aboard with you. So far, so good.

In an Aug. 17 , Culver City Superintendent Quoc Tran announced that students would need to show proof of immunization by Nov. 19. Families who fail to comply by that date will have to enroll their children in a , EdSource reported.

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Dorit Reiss, vaccine policy expert and professor of law at University of California, Hastings, and Dennis Roche, co-founder of the website Burbio, which has tracked school policy throughout the pandemic, told ����Ӱ�� that they were not aware of any other school district in the nation mandating COVID vaccinations for students.

The decision, CCUSD spokesperson Geoff Maleman told ����Ӱ��, was primarily motivated by concerns for student and staff safety due to the Delta surge.

“Our goal, obviously, was not just to be the first. It was really to make sure that we kept our staff and students as safe as we possibly could,” Maleman said.

While health experts agree that vaccines deliver strong protection against COVID-19, including the Delta variant, research indicates that coronavirus shots need not be a prerequisite to schools reopening safely, provided that mitigation measures such as universal masking, 3-foot distancing and adequate ventilation are followed.

Underscoring the shifting ground nationally on the subject of vaccinations, New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio announced Friday that , meaning some 20,000 individuals will have to receive at least one dose by the first day of competition.

In Culver City, Reiss thinks the district’s legal grounding may prove shaky: The list of immunizations required for public school enrollment is determined at the state level, she said, and is typically not left for individual districts to decide. Across California, teachers are required to get immunized against the coronavirus or submit to weekly testing. The school system will likely argue that the vaccines mandated by the state represent a floor, not a ceiling, for districts’ immunization requirements, she said, but California’s long-standing precedent of dictating vaccine policy statewide may weaken their claim.

“They’re taking a legal risk here,” the law professor told ����Ӱ��. “I would be surprised if there’s no lawsuit.”

Maleman, acknowledging “this is a divisive issue,” said that the decision to require students get the COVID-19 shot was vetted by the district’s legal team.

Community members in the southern California district, Maleman points out, have largely supported the vaccination rule. Superintendent Tran estimated that some , the Los Angeles Times reported. In response to a post announcing the policy on the district’s Facebook page, the .

“Seeing this makes me feel so proud of being a Culver City alumni,” one Facebook user wrote.

Currently, individuals 12 years old and up are eligible to receive coronavirus inoculations. Children aged 5 to 11 may be authorized for shots as early as the , according to national health officials.

Over the summer, COVID-19 case rates in adolescents nationwide have , from 3.4 cases per 100,000 12- to 15-year olds in June to 14.6 cases per 100,000 in August, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Under 1 in 3 adolescents are fully vaccinated, while the same is true for .

Outside California, states including , and have also enacted rules requiring educators to receive vaccinations or be tested regularly — in some cases threatening that teachers who refuse could be fired. Other states are . In the realm of higher education, more than across the U.S., including the 23-campus California State University system, mandate that students returning to campus this fall must receive the COVID vaccine.

In Culver City, Maleman hopes other K-12 districts may follow suit in requiring students to receive coronavirus vaccinations.

“We’re the first but hopefully we’re not the last,” he said.