By Cassandra Fairbanks, January 2, 2022
Los Angeles Unified Schools were planning to implement an extreme vaccine mandate for students but had to cancel it when 30,000 kids were not in compliance.
In September, the school board for the second-largest school district in the United States voted to mandate that students 12 and older be vaccinated by Jan. 10.
“Los Angeles had planned to shift students who remained unvaccinated by Jan. 10 into its online school, City of Angels. Many worried about its ability to accommodate tens of thousands of new students at the start of the next semester and the disruption it would cause for staff and children,” USA Today reported.
Politico reports, “other U.S. districts in blue states are scaling back previous student mandate ideas, too. School leaders in Portland, Ore., tabled discussion this fall amid vigorous pushback, while New York and Chicago have taken a wait-and-see approach. Not only are they wary of mandate critics, but they also question whether they should impose a requirement before the Food and Drug Administration fully approves vaccines for their students — a threshold Los Angeles Unified didn’t wait for.”
According to the Politico report, districts are looking at which students are least likely to be vaccinated and weighing if moving them to remote learning would help or harm.
“Districts elsewhere have weighed which students are most likely to be unvaccinated if a mandate is enforced, and the drawbacks of having those students learn under remote instruction,” Politico reported.
The report did not elaborate on what criteria or metrics that districts were looking at.