School Board Member Demands Emergency Vaccination Policy Meeting Before Classes Start Thursday

A day and a half before Pasadena Unified School District’s 2021-22 school year was set to begin,  School Board member Tina Fredericks held a press conference on the steps of Willard Elementary School Tuesday to demand that the district convene a special meeting Wednesday, August 11, to discuss a policy for mandated vaccines for every PUSD employee.

Said Fredericks, “PUSD is set to open full-time, in-person, five days a week, on August 12, 2021, with no physical distancing requirement, and with students under the age of 12 currently ineligible to be vaccinated.”

Fredericks, who was joined by Mayor Victor Gordo and more than a dozen parents and students,  added that PUSD has nearly 16,000 students, 9,805 of whom are students below the age of 12, and ineligible to get the COVID vaccine.

As of Wednesday morning, no emergency meeting appears on the Board’s online schedule.

“While it has been reported that PUSD has a 96% vaccination rate of its employees,” she continued,  “that still means 89 employees are unvaccinated. A 96% vaccination rate is irrelevant to the 2,225 elementary students or more who will be assigned to schools or classrooms with unvaccinated personnel.  An elementary school student who ends up with an unvaccinated teacher will share space, share air with that teacher 5 days a week, 6 hours a day.”

“That is the reality that parents here at Willard Elementary and 13 other PUSD elementary schools have to face.  This is my reality, too, with a daughter under 12 years old.”

Fredericks said she doesn’t think the district’s relationship with teacher unions should prevent a mandate.

“Just to be clear, I do not believe our labor unions are an obstacle. As soon as the board votes in favor of a vaccine mandate, we can initiate negotiations to ensure fairness and equity,” she added.

Mayor Gordo, standing on the steps of his former elementary school, said, “These parents and children are here to say, ‘Let’s not wait until August 19th (the date of the next PUSD Board meeting), nearly two weeks after school has started.  Let’s not wait until then, and look back and wonder what we could have done differently. Now is the time to act.”

One parent at the conference spoke about her young daughter’s fear of visiting her grandmother after a day of school for fear that her grandmother might contract the disease from an unvaccinated PUSD staff member.

The PUSD Board of Education has yet to decide whether or not it will require vaccinations and weekly COVID-19 testing for its staff and eligible students.

At its last meeting on August 5, the Board’s Vice President Elizabeth Pomeroy said the mandatory vaccination and weekly testing issues will be included among the action items in the agenda for an upcoming meeting.

Pomeroy seemed reluctant to push the issue after two board members, Kimberly Kenne and Fredericks, tried to persuade the board to come up with policy decisions.

Pomeroy responded that those matters were not on the agenda as action items, and thus were precluded from voting.

“We have a lot of information and material,” said Pomeroy. “Perhaps we need even more and this could come before us as an action item at the next meeting,” adding, “I think we know enough to be able to open [the schools].”

Over the past week, said Fredericks, an increasing number of experts have spoken out in support of mandating vaccines for teachers.

Randy Weingarten, president of American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers union in the county, said recently, “Circumstances have changed. It weighs really heavily on me that kids under 12 can’t get vaccinated.”

The U.S. military and a number of major corporations,  including Google, Apple, Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Disney, have also recently mandated vaccinations for their employees.

In addition, Dr. Anthony Fauci, chief medical advisor on COVID-19 to the President, said Tuesday,  “We should [mandate teacher vaccinations]…we are in a critical situation now. We have had 615,000 deaths and we are in a major surge now as we’re going into the fall, into the school season. This is very serious business.”

“What we’re asking is for the Board to protect the students,” said another parent, who spoke anonymously, “but also to protect the staff and the teachers. That’s their job, and we want them to lead. The message we have gotten from the District is that they are considering measures to prevent an outbreak. I think that it’s too little and too late for that. We want a complete plan that includes regular testing and vaccinations, as part of that structure.”

Said parent Julie Schneiderman, “I was speaking with (PUSD) Board Member Jennifer Lee yesterday, and she was advocating that PUSD is 95% vaccinated, but I wasn’t concerned about the 95, I was concerned about the five.”

“I wanted  her to give me some reassurance that one of the five percent unvaccinated  teachers would not be one of my children’s teachers,” she continued, .and I could not get confirmation that one of those staff members would not be (in a classroom) with my elementary schoolchildren, and they’re in there, eight hours a day, five days a week.”

PUSD parent Esmeralda Nava, whose daughter attends Washington Elementary, said at the press conference, “This has been a crazy year. We know of the effects of the disease. My father passed away from COVID, so we know very directly how it affects you.”

Nava said that her family knew much about the “regular COVID disease,” but that the new variants are “so much more dangerous, so we can’t put our children at risk. It doesn’t make sense.”