The San Diego Unified School Board unanimously approved Tuesday night a mandate that staff and students age 16 and older be fully vaccinated against COVID-19 by Dec. 20.
The board meeting followed a rally involving several hundred people protesting the mandate in front of the San Diego Unified School Board headquarters.
“Tonight we’re making a statement that we believe in the science, we believe in the process and that we are serious about this, that we want to protect children,” School Board Vice President Sharon Whitehurst-Payne said during the meeting.
San Diego Unified’s mandate makes full COVID vaccination mandatory for students when the vaccine is fully approved by the Food and Drug istration for their age group.
Currently the Pfizer/BioNTech vaccine is fully approved for people age 16 and older.
Kristen Taketa on the San Diego News Fix podcast:
It has emergency authorization approval for children age 12 to 15. Last week, Pfizer and BioNTech announced results that show its COVID vaccine is safe and effective for children ages 5 to 11, and the companies are pursuing emergency authorization approval for that age group.
San Diego Unified students 16 or older now have to be vaccinated by Dec. 20 as a requirement for attending school in person. Those who do not comply will be required to do remote learning, via independent study, according to the district’s plan.
Students under 16 will be required to test regularly for COVID until a vaccine is fully approved for their age group.
Medical exemptions will be allowed, but not personal belief exemptions, the district said.
Students may be “conditionally enrolled” in in-person learning if they are in a disadvantaged group, such as if they are homeless, have disabilities, or are military or foster youth, San Diego Unified said.
The mandate also makes full vaccination against COVID a requirement for employment with the district by Dec. 20. The district will be able to fire or otherwise discipline employees who don’t comply.
About 65 percent of San Diego Unified students 12 and older have gotten at least one dose of the vaccine, the district said; 57 percent have been fully vaccinated.
Meanwhile about 81 percent of San Diego Unified employees have received at least one dose of a COVID vaccine, while 76 percent are fully vaccinated.
San Diego Unified cited testimony from seven UC San Diego experts who a mandate.
A vaccine mandate will reduce COVID spread in schools, reduce chances of kids bringing COVID home to their families, and help protect children from getting sick with COVID or with multisystem inflammatory syndrome, a related serious condition, experts said.
A mandate also will help to achieve herd immunity in the community, experts said.
“FDA approval comes with extensive safety checks and the risk/benefit ratio clearly favors vaccination over the risk of symptomatic COVID infections, multisystem inflammatory syndrome, and community spread,” said Kimberly Brouwer, infectious disease epidemiologist at UC San Diego, as quoted in the district’s proposal. “This decision would be in line with existing, non-COVID vaccine requirements school children already meet for school and public health safety.”
A vaccine mandate will also help keep more kids in school, learning in person.
“That’s something that I know the vast majority of parents want,” said pediatrician and state Senator Dr. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, during the district’s presentation of the vaccine proposal. “They want their children to be safe, they want their children to be in school, they want their children to be able to stay in school, and that’s what this policy really is about.”
Asymptomatic students and staff who are vaccinated won’t have to stay home from school if they come in with someone at school who tests positive for COVID, according to the state’s quarantine rules.
Students under 18 must have parental consent to get vaccinated.
San Diego Unified School Board President Richard Barrera said his biggest concern about the vaccine mandate is that students might be unintentionally barred from school because their parents aren’t aware they’re supposed to be vaccinated.
“We do not want to have students who are not coming to school, not because their parents made a clear choice … not to have them vaccinated, but because parents didn’t get the right information at the right time,” he said.
Parents, teachers and others against the vaccine mandate said during the board meeting that they are worried about potential adverse effects from the vaccine. Several said they don’t think the vaccine is necessary because children have been less likely to get seriously sick or die from COVID; no child under 10 has died from COVID in San Diego County, and two in the 10-19 age group have died since the pandemic began.
Jacob Womack, dean of students at San Diego Unified’s ALBA Community Day School, asked the board if it was willing to risk losing potentially thousands of employees and students who may leave the district because they don’t want to be vaccinated.
“Is the district willing to lose millions in funding?” Womack said.
Medical professionals, parents, teachers, students and others spoke for the mandate, saying that unvaccinated people are overwhelmingly more likely to get seriously sick from or to die from COVID, and that COVID can harm children.
“The FDA-approved vaccination is the best that human science has to offer. If you don’t trust it, you shouldn’t get medical care of any kind from humans trained in science,” said Mica Pollock, a San Diego High parent, during the meeting. “We’ve mandated other vaccinations for generations to protect children. Vaccination mandates aren’t new; it’s just public health.”
More than 1,650 people requested to speak against the vaccine mandate at Tuesday’s board meeting, according to the district; 83 requested to speak in favor. Some speaking in favor questioned how many of the opponents live in San Diego Unified’s boundaries or are district parents.
Hours before the board meeting, more than 350 people protested against the vaccine mandate outside San Diego Unified’s headquarters. The rally was led by people who have spoken against COVID restrictions and safety measures at other government board meetings across the county and who have publicly defied COVID lockdown orders.
Among the rally speakers was Sharon McKeeman, a Carlsbad resident who founded Let Them Breathe, a group that has sued the state for its school mask mandate and has helped organized anti-mask protests at school board meetings across the state. The group has 19,000 on its Facebook page.
Also Amy Reichert, an organizer of ReOpen San Diego, said, “We want you to leave our kids alone” into a microphone as the crowd roared.
Few people in the crowd wore masks. Many of the protesters carried signs, some saying “What are the long term effect of the vaccine? Don’t risk it!” and “There’s a 99.998 percent chance your vax will not touch my kids,” and “Why aren’t we taking ivermectin?” referring to an anti-parasitic drug that has not been shown to be safe or effective against COVID.
Many rally attendees and speakers said they do not have children attending San Diego Unified schools but they still wanted to speak out against COVID vaccine mandates.
Some speakers said vaccine mandates would infringe on their freedom of choice and are an injustice that should be fought.
“We’re here right now as people in the United States of America standing up for our rights,” said Lou Uridel, who last year was arrested for opening his Oceanside gym against county pandemic restrictions. “If we have to walk our kids into those schools and make ’em sit down and make ’em take our kids, whether they are vaccinated or not, we will. If we have to pull every single kid out of school and home school them, we will.”
Let Them Breathe has started another initiative called Let Them Choose, which is leading the opposition against San Diego Unified’s proposed vaccine mandate.
Last week Let Them Choose sent a letter to San Diego Unified leadership arguing that individual school districts or school boards don’t have the legal authority to mandate a COVID vaccine. The group also argues that a COVID vaccine mandate is unnecessary for students because children are less likely to get seriously sick or to die from COVID.
While children are less likely than adults to be hospitalized or die from COVID, children make up an increased percentage of unvaccinated people and hospitalizations.
Let Them Choose also argues that a COVID vaccine mandate would infringe on students’ fundamental right to an education by barring unvaccinated children from in-person school.
School vaccine mandates are not new. For example, California schoolchildren already must get vaccines for such diseases as chickenpox, polio, Hepatitis B and others to enter kindergarten.
Some California school districts have adopted student COVID vaccine mandates in recent weeks, including Los Angeles Unified, Oakland Unified and Culver City Unified. State health officials said last week they are considering a statewide COVID vaccine mandate for students age 12 and older.
San Diego’s mandate does not go as far as Los Angeles Unified’s, which requires vaccines for all students age 12 and older.
At Tuesday’s meeting, San Diego Unified’s Student Trustee Zachary Patterson proposed extending the mandate to students 12 and older, noting that the district’s proposed mandate would only affect about half the district’s high school students.
But other board said they weren’t yet ready to approve a mandate for younger students but will discuss the idea at a board meeting in October.
Andrea Lopez-Villafana contributed to this story.
