Cuesta College board votes on COVID vaccine requirement. Here’s what you need to know
The Cuesta College Board of Trustees voted on a resolution during its Wednesday afternoon meeting on whether to allow college President and Superintendent Jill Stearns the authority to require COVID-19 vaccines for “students, employees and others” who access campus facilities.
The board voted 5-1 in favor of the resolution, with Trustee Peter Sysak dissenting.
Passage of the resolution means the board of trustees direct Stearns to “take any and all actions necessary to develop and implement a COVID-19 vaccine requirement” for those who access campus facilities.
“The vaccine is the most effective means of preventing the spread of infection and being able to protect our campus and community at large,” Stearns said during the meeting Wednesday.
The vaccine requirement goes into effect no later than Oct. 15, according to the resolution.
Stearns noted that “the resolution is in alignment with the California Public Health Department and the state superintendent of schools, who have enacted a vaccine requirement for K-12 education institutions, and that the CSU and UC systems have adopted vaccine requirements for California’s public universities.”
Additionally, Allan Hancock College in Santa Maria has implemented a COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
The resolution did not come without some pushback from the community and Trustee Sysak, mostly over concerns of how broad the vaccine requirement could be following the language in the resolution.
Elizabeth Lobo, an anatomy and microbiology teacher at Cuesta, said during public comment that “the vaccine against SARS-CoV-2 prevents the enduring morbidity and death that may result in some individuals, particularly older adults. The CDC currently recommends complete vaccination for all people over age 12 including those who’ve already been sick with COVID.”
However, Lobo was concerned that some members of the Cuesta College community, particularly those who are Hispanic, may be disproportionately impacted by the COVID-19 vaccine requirement.
“This application of a vaccine requirement or testing will disproportionately harm our student body and may further erode enrollment amongst certain groups of our student body,” she said.
Sysak was concerned that the COVID-19 vaccine requirement was unnecessary, given the other precautions in place at the college including a mask mandate and better ventilation technology in classrooms.
He, too, was concerned about the disproportionate impact requiring COVID-19 vaccines may have on the college’s Hispanic population, which makes up about 34% of the student body, according to the college’s data for fall 2021. About 53% of the student body is white.
“Has there been any consideration made to the Hispanic and Latin community members who have a real fear of getting the HIPAA shot — or getting the COVID shots because, you know, they’re going to a government agency, many of them are illegals, they’re afraid to go and get the shots,” he said during Wednesday’s meeting. “And we have a lot of those folks enrolled in our ESL (English as a second language) classes, your in-person classes. And now we’re going to tell them that they can’t come to these classes unless they go to some government agency to get some COVID shots?”
In response, Stearns said the college over the past three days has been giving out $250 gift cards to students who are fully vaccinated against COVID-19. So far, 1,548 of those gift cards have been given out, Stearns said, for a total of $387,000.
“And this morning, we ran the racial demographic to take a look and make sure that there was not an equity issue there,” Stearns said. “And the breakdown, by race of our students who have received cards, aligns almost exactly with our current student demographic.”
Stearns assured the board during the meeting in the course of implementing the COVID-19 vaccine requirement, it will “provide options for our students or employees in the community who wish to come to campus.”
This story was originally published August 25, 2021 at 6:24 PM.
