How soon teachers can expect to get vaccinated depends largely on where they live and could determine whether the bulk of California’s students return to campuses this spring — or next fall.
Teacher vaccinations have emerged as a central point of contention in California’s charged debate over reopening schools as unions representing teachers and school employees have listed vaccine access as one of their demands before returning to campuses.
But, faced with a limited supply and dueling priority groups, many of California’s largest counties have not yet begun offering vaccines to teachers. And though some counties expect to begin vaccinating teachers within the next week or so, leaders in several others told CalMatters that limited supply makes it difficult to project when their educators could expect a dose. Some counties don’t expect to offer vaccinations to teachers until mid to late March.
State Sen. Josh Becker, D-Menlo Park, called on Feb. 9 for the immediate vaccination of teachers in San Mateo and Santa Clara counties.
He said that the number of available doses and public school teachers mean both counties can manage to efficiently distribute vaccines. San Mateo County, where there are about 5,000 teachers, is administering an average of 9,000 doses per week, and Santa Clara County has about 13,000 teachers and is administering an average of around 45,000 (first and second) doses a week, according to Becker’s office.
“This is doable,” he said in a press release. “Vaccinating teachers and beginning to safely reopen schools will be the most meaningful move yet to return to normalcy for everyone.”
Local educators have been waiting for news from the counties on when they’ll have access to the vaccine, while many schools are already open and others continue to plan to partially resume in-person interaction or instruction. Teachers unions in the area have asked that all teachers be vaccinated before returning to their classrooms in person.
Becker suggested both counties designate an upcoming week to inoculate teachers.
“If we do that we still have the chance to save spring classes.”
Mixed messaging and a decentralized approach have resulted in a chaotic vaccine rollout roughly two months after the first doses prioritized for frontline health workers arrived in California in mid-December.
Gov. Gavin Newsom said during a press conference Feb. 9 that schools are unlikely to physically reopen this school year if vaccinations for every teacher are a prerequisite.
“When you’re receiving less than 600,000 first doses a week, and you start to do the math … then we need to be honest with people, and let them know … that it’s very unlikely that we’ll be able to accomplish that very idealistic goal before the end of the school year because of the scarcity of supply in vaccinations,” he said.
Currently, many of the state’s largest counties are approaching or have begun distributing doses to those in the first tier of Phase 1B of the state’s vaccination priority list. That broad group encompasses 8.5 million Californians and includes teachers, farm workers and first responders as well as residents 65 and older.
Newsom acknowledged Feb. 8 that vaccine scarcity has hampered the ability of local public health departments to vaccinate teachers in large numbers. A recent plan by the governor to incentivize school districts to reopen campuses with extra per-pupil funding stalled after many school officials, unions and legislators said it was unworkable.
At his Feb. 8 press conference, Newsom said he hoped to announce a new school reopening deal with the Legislature “this week” that would include “a prioritization framework to get our teachers vaccinated.”
“The challenge is self-evident,” Newsom said. “In each and every county, they have different capacity issues, different demographics, different issues in terms of availability of the vaccine and the number of people that they have prioritized within those tiers.”
Several public-health experts as well as the governor, who’s under intense public pressure to reopen K-12 public schools this spring, have said in-person learning can be done safely without vaccinating educators if paired with strict preventative measures such as masking, ventilation and cohorting students.
Newsom, who recently told school superintendents that requiring teacher vaccinations for reopening schools would effectively keep them closed this spring, has cited “low” numbers of transmission within reopened schools as evidence that in-person instruction has not resulted in higher community spread. In January, 87 cases were linked to schools, a figure Newsom said was lower compared to November and December despite the state’s surge in cases and deaths.
The state, however, has yet to publish any data on cases in schools to affirm figures cited by Newsom. It remains one of the few states that is not publicly tracking which schools are open and whether they’ve experienced outbreaks. Under new state guidance, the California Department of Public Health began collecting this information from schools Jan. 25; the agency said in a statement Feb. 5 that it will provide the information on its new school website “in the near future.”
In many of California’s largest counties, the approach of the end of the school year has heightened the stakes in the complicated race to vaccinate educators. Most of the state’s public schools end the academic term in late May and early June, and full inoculation requires the administration of two vaccine doses spaced a month apart.
As of Feb. 5, Santa Clara County was not vaccinating educators, and health and education leaders could not offer a timeline for when it would, primarily because of limited vaccine supply, they said. San Mateo County remains in Phase 1A and is prioritizing “those eligible at greatest risk of death.” Other large counties such as San Diego, San Joaquin and Kern are not yet vaccinating educators, citing vaccine scarcity.
CalMatters is a Sacramento-based nonpartisan, nonprofit journalism venture that works with more than 130 media partners throughout the state, including The Almanac.
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