Soon, 10% of SLO County’s vaccines will be saved for teachers. But how will that work?
Beginning in March, 10% of the COVID-19 vaccines sent to San Luis Obispo County will be set aside for teachers, childcare providers and other educators.
But beyond that, the details are fuzzy, the county Public Health Department told The Tribune.
For example, how will the county track whether 10% are actually administered to educators, will it be on a weekly basis or by-shipment basis, and does it include just kindergarten through 12th-grade teachers or those in higher education as well?
“Hopefully, we will have more information from the state in coming days,” San Luis Obispo County Public Health spokesperson Michelle Shoresman wrote in an email to The Tribune on Monday.
The vaccine allotment to educators was announced by Gov. Gavin Newsom during his visit to an Oakland vaccination clinic on Friday. He told reporters during a press conference that COVID-19 vaccines must be administered to educators “sooner than the current path that we’re on” as more schools across the county and state begin to reopen to in-person instruction.
The 10% allotment will begin March 1.
Administering 10% of the allotted vaccines to educators will be a massive step up for the county, which has lagged behind other counties in prioritizing educator inoculations.
The county receives a rough average of 4,200 COVID-19 vaccines per week from the state. If 10% of those had already been allocated to teachers, the county would have had a total of about 3,980 doses available to teachers by this week since vaccine shipments began in mid-December.
That’s more than the number of educators who are working in-person right now, according to County Superintendent Jim Brescia, who told The Tribune that roughly half of the 6,000 education employees — including teachers, staff and administrators — in San Luis Obispo County are working in-person daily.
About 200 educators in the county have received their first COVID-19 vaccine doses as of Friday, Brescia said. That’s just 0.55% of all vaccines doses administered — 36,611 as of Feb. 19 — in the county, according to the San Luis Obispo County Public Health Department.
The county’s lag on prioritizing educators for vaccine eligibility has angered teachers, parents, unions and local school board members alike.
“I would have been nice to have already had the vaccine rather than trying to play catchup,” said Lucia Mar Teachers Association President Cody King. “We’ve had teachers back teaching kids who can’t wear masks since September. So they should have been vaccinated from day one.”
At a San Luis Coastal Unified School District board meeting on Feb. 16, trustee Mark Buchman said that teachers are first responders who should have been vaccinated against COVID-19 earlier.
“Our teachers are first responders every day, all the time,” Buchman said. “They’re the ones that have to identify poverty, hunger, abuse and mental health issues with kids.”
“They become first responders for fire, earthquakes and other disasters,” Buchman continued. “And I don’t understand why they weren’t given vaccinations first.”
The county Public Health Department maintains that lack of vaccine supply paired with an extremely high demand has kept teachers out of the running for vaccine prioritization.
The only way they’d be eligible is if they also fell into the older age categories.
“Since all vaccine appointments for this week were open to people 65+, they were also open to teachers 65+,” Shoresman wrote in an email to The Tribune.
