Oregon Governor Kate Brown is being criticized by some residents and teachers’ unions for her plan to prioritize vaccinating school staff before the state’s elderly population.
The plan will help the state reopen schools in the spring, Brown said in a statement on Friday.
“I made a commitment for the first time at the end of last year to vaccinate educators and school staff in Oregon, and reaffirmed that commitment last week,” she said, despite some reactions. “Educators can be vaccinated quickly, district by district. This choice represents rapid action that will have a disproportionate impact on children in Oregon.”
The plan is a departure from the recommendations issued by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that frontline health workers and elderly populations be vaccinated before other frontline workers.
Brown, however, argues that “many” Oregon educators “would not be vaccinated this school year” if she followed the CDC’s recommendations “and Oregon’s children would continue to suffer.
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“If we reverse this and prioritize the needs of children in Oregon, there will be a two-week delay in starting vaccination for elderly people living independently,” said Brown. “I know that many Oregon grandparents are happy to endure just two more weeks in an effort to help get their grandchildren back to the classroom as quickly and safely as possible.”
The Educational Freedom Institute, a non-profit organization that supports school choice, says schools have the ability to reopen safely.
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“Substantial data indicates that schools can reopen in person safely and that schools are not the main drivers of the community’s overall transmission,” Corey DeAngelis, director of the School Choice of the Reason Foundation and executive director of the EFI, told Fox News. He pointed to New York City, which has a positivity rate for COVID-19 of about 9%, while the positivity rate for city schools is only 0.50%.
President Joe Biden is pushing for most US schools to reopen in their first 100 days in office, but the new government’s testing secretary recently admitted that the schedule could be adjusted as needed.
A teacher wearing an N95 face mask teaches math (iStock)
Portland’s second-grade Spanish teacher Francisca Alvarez, who lives with her 78-year-old mother, told local news agency KOIN on Thursday that she does not believe that returning to school would be safe despite efforts to vaccinate educators and other school staff.
Alvarez told the channel that his mother barely survived COVID-19 and fears that she could be infected again.
“I want to be in the classroom,” she said. “I don’t like to teach in this virtual way, but my mantra – my belief – is if we survive, we can teach later, we can learn, we can close the performance gap.”
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She added that reopening the existing COVID-19 security measures, such as six feet of social distance and wearing a mandatory mask that schools across the country have adopted to continue face-to-face or hybrid learning, would be “torture” for students and for teachers.
“We went back to school and the students still need to keep two meters away and wear their masks,” she told KOIN. “They are young children and are dying to be around their classmates and they don’t understand, so my biggest concern is how I am going to keep them safe at school.”
The Portland Teachers’ Association (PAT) and the Oregon Education Association (OAS) did not immediately respond to questions from Fox News.
At least 55.1 million children are out of the classroom due to the coronavirus pandemic, Education Week estimates. (Credit: Fox News)
Elizabeth Thiel, PAT’s president, also told Oregon Public Broadcasting that vaccinating teachers would not be enough to reopen schools safely.
“Our schools are safe when our community is safe,” Thiel told the channel. “Our educators and our students go in and out of schools and come back to families. You cannot have safe schools without safe communities.”
DeAngelis suggested that public and private schools have different incentives, which could be part of the driving factor behind the opposition of public school teachers to face-to-face learning.
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“Private schools have been struggling to reopen, but many public schools and teacher unions are still struggling to remain closed,” he said. “The main difference is one of the incentives: one of these sectors receives its money regardless of whether they open doors for business”.
He added that “families are running out of money” because if schools don’t reopen, families can’t just “take their children’s education dollars elsewhere” as they would if the local store closed.
The COVID-19 vaccine has yet to prove effective in children, although vaccine manufacturers such as Pfizer have recruited healthy volunteers to participate in studies to determine the effectiveness of inoculating the vaccine in minors.
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COVID-19 cases in Oregon are gradually declining after a peak during the holidays. The Oregon Health Authority said in its weekly report on Thursday that daily cases fell 4% to 7,860 positive cases per day during the week that started on January 11 compared to the previous week. Hospitalizations also declined slightly, but deaths increased.
More than half of the state’s COVID-19 cases are caused by people between the ages of 20 and 49, while people over 70 are responsible for 77% of COVID-19-related deaths in Oregon.