GREENVILLE – Now that they know that teachers are eligible, the only missing piece in the Greenville County Schools’ massive vaccine plan for coronavirus is when it will be released.
Parents were warned to wait because schools will be closed for a total of four days next month.
The largest school district in the state, with more than 10,000 employees and about 75,000 students, has focused “for weeks” on rapid vaccinations for teachers and staff, devising a detailed strategy, including diagrams, of how, where and who will administer the vaccines, said school spokesman Tim Waller.
“It really wasn’t a hasty plan,” said Waller.
It promises to be among the biggest vaccination events of all time in Greenville, but it depends when the doses requested by the school district arrive. The district asked all of its employees to signal by March 1 if they wanted to be vaccinated, and 6,100 confirmed that they were.
Bon Secours will receive the district’s vaccines in the next two or three weeks, and hospital spokeswoman Jennifer Robinson said the state’s Department of Health and Environmental Control had approved the school district’s vaccination plan.
Administrators identified two schools where district nurses will administer the necessary vaccines by appointment over two days. Depending on which vaccine is in these injections, the whole process will be repeated in three or four weeks.
At stake is the safety of employees who normally interact with dozens, if not hundreds, of people a day. Since the beginning of the school year, 1,567 adults working for Greenville County Schools have been infected with the virus.
Unfortunately for working parents, the district’s vaccination plan also depends on all students staying home during the day. Administrators alerted tens of thousands of parents in a March 4 email that they need to have a nursery ready in “short term”. Classes will continue online at home.
“It is possible that Bon Secours receives only a portion of the doses requested from GCS employees,” said the e-mail. “In that case, we will run vaccination clinics on two different, non-consecutive days, which means that parents will need to prepare for child care on two non-consecutive days.”
School spokesman Tim Waller predicted that families would have two or three days to prepare.
“Parents wouldn’t find out the night before that we were going to e-learning,” said Waller.
Alison Trainer, a music teacher at Furman University, has two daughters in elementary school. She said she is ready to leave work for teachers to be vaccinated, but she wondered how realistic this is for other working parents.
“Not everyone has that luxury,” she said.
Still, she and other parents across the county were ecstatic at the news that teachers would be vaccinated.
“We think it will be a game changer,” Waller said of the vaccines. “We think it will inspire confidence both in our teachers and in students and parents.”
Thousands of parents protested in January, when the school district reopened schools amid what at the time was the worst local coronavirus outbreak since the pandemic hit South Carolina in March 2020. The district has repeatedly pointed to studies that show face-to-face instruction. the face is safe with mitigation measures in place. Everyone in Greenville County schools wear masks and students sit in desks protected by transparent plexiglass.
Candace Eidson, whose daughter is an elementary school student in the district, has often expressed concerns about school safety protocols. She said she is very happy with the teachers’ vaccines, but she does not want the surveillance around the virus to diminish. Eidson analyzed publicly available data on school infections and found that some are much more prone to coronavirus outbreaks than others. For example, children at Riverside Middle were twice as likely to contract coronavirus this year as compared to children at Woodmont Middle.
Eidson said schools should be publicly rated for the effectiveness of their security protocols.
“We hold restaurants responsible,” she said. “There are safety ratings at all manufacturing companies. Why not at schools?”
Vaccine doses are likely to come from Pfizer or Moderna, each requiring two injections several weeks apart. The Johnson and Johnson single-dose vaccine will not be widely available until April, state health officials said earlier this week. Robinson said that Bon Secours does not know what they are going to achieve.
To date, at least 675,000 South Carolinaians have started vaccinating, nearly 72,000 of them in Greenville County. But the supply of vaccine doses, while increasing, has fallen short of demand.
Bon Secours’ Robinson said school district vaccines would not be included in the regular distribution of the health care system. In other words, Greenville teachers will not be competing for doses directly with the rest of the population.
“We place separate orders for Bon Secours and Greenville County schools,” wrote Robinson by email. “So we don’t have to separate – two different batches have been ordered.”
Employers across South Carolina learned on March 2 that the state would open on March 8 the eligibility of the vaccine for frontline workers who interact closely with the public or coworkers throughout the day.
This put teachers, whose advocates struggled for weeks to put educators on the front lines, in a “Phase 1B” group of 2.7 million people who, at one time, will be eligible next week. This group, in addition to 1.2 million people eligible for Phase 1A vaccination, covers well over half of the state’s population.
Despite the mammoth task ahead, state health officials were optimistic during a March 3 presentation that anyone eligible for an injection in phases 1A and 1B will be able to obtain one in mid-April. Phase 1C, which expands the eligibility for anyone aged 45 or over or who has an “essential job” that does not require other people to be around, will likely launch on April 12 – around the same time as the Health officials said they expected Johnson’s production and the Johnson vaccine to increase exponentially.
As of March 4, Greenville County’s vaccination rate among its population was practically intermediate compared to other counties in South Carolina. Tiny McCormick County currently leads the state with 31.2% of its population aged 15 or over. more having received at least one injection. Data from the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control show that 17.6% of Greenville’s adult population received at least one injection.
Waller said teachers and other district officials do not need to attend mass clinics planned by the school district and are free to register for vaccines wherever they want, if ever. Whether signing up for a Walgreens or a Harris Teeter will get someone vaccinated faster than waiting for the school district’s own mass clinic is unknown at this time.
Some vaccine suppliers have already started to register possible recipients of vaccine 1B. Others will open this process on March 8.
The advantages for faculty and school staff to get vaccines at district vaccine clinics are logistical in nature.
First, with school buildings closed during the day, teachers will not have to squeeze vaccine markings on a busy day.
Waller said the school district expects, but still does not know, that the two days will be a Thursday and a Friday.
Vaccines will be provided by appointment, which means that teachers will only lose part of the day needed to drive to a vaccine clinic, the 15 minutes or more they are there and the trip back. Waller said the district understands that it would otherwise be busy teaching online.
The clinics will be installed at Greer High School and Woodmont High School, both chosen as central locations in the north and south of the county, Waller said. The daycare center will also be available to district faculty and staff at vaccination sites.
“We think it will be a really efficient operation,” said Waller.