Los Angeles Unified School District Will Have to Vote to Force Covid-19 Vaccines to Eligible Students

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“Let’s imagine that by the second semester, our high school and high school campuses will be even safer than they are today,” John Terman Ortiz Franklin, a member of the LAUSD school board, told CNN magazine Thursday morning.

According to a report included with an online copy of Thursday’s agenda, all students 12 years of age or older who attend school in person should have received the first dose by November 21 at the latest and be completely vaccinated on December 19th. participation in face-to-face extracurricular activities should be fully vaccinated by the end of October.

The report says “students with qualified and approved exemptions and conditional admissions” would be excluded from the mandate, but does not provide additional details on possible exemptions.

LAUSD, which serves more than 600,000 students and began school on August 16, would be the first major school district in the United States to require Covid-19 vaccines for its eligible students. A smaller district in Los Angeles County, Culver City’s unified school district, announced in August that it planned to require vaccination of eligible students in mid-November.

LAUSD estimates that at least 150,000 doses will need to be administered if the requirement is approved, Franklin said, but Los Angeles County has the doses and capacity to undertake that effort.

Students who reject the vaccine but have no exemption can enroll in the district’s Independent Studies Program, an online resource that already has about 15,000 students who have opted for this learning option for a variety of reasons, Franklin said.

The district is “trying to do everything we can to keep our schools safe,” Franklin said, including creating masks, testing and upgrading schools’ air filtration systems.

“Cases are on the rise and children are at risk of the Delta variant in ways we didn’t see last semester,” he said, “and our responsibility to children and our communities is their safety and well-being.”

The Pfizer / BioNTech vaccine is the only one available in the United States authorized for emergency use for children between the ages of 12 and 15, although the vaccine has received full approval from the U.S. ‘Food and Drugs of the United States for Persons Over 16 Years of Age.

But that’s not a problem for the LAUSD school board, Franklin told CNN: “We understand that the benefits far outweigh the risks, and therefore the emergency permit is not weighing on our decision.”

“It’s about access,” he added, “and that we can provide it to our children in this country and we want to do it as quickly as possible.”

Board member Jackie Goldberg said the mandate was to “save lives,” CNN affiliate KCBS / KCAL reported.

“That’s why there are no measles, mumps and rubella in our schools, because we vaccinate and we need it.”

White House Press Secretary Jen Psaki praised the move on Thursday and told CNN, “It’s good for them.” But he also said it was important that everyone around the students was also inoculated to protect students under the age of 12 who could not receive vaccines.

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