Teachers and Communities of Color Need the Vaccine Now - Calabro
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
Teachers, school staff, parents and students want nothing more than to get back to the days when school really felt like school, with everyone in classrooms, recess on playgrounds, sports, after-school activities, chats in hallways and all the other things we took for granted at school until the coronavirus invaded our lives.
But getting there requires a specific plan to give everyone involved the confidence to walk into schools and feel safe. It’s been a year since the virus was detected, a year since we’ve known it is highly contagious and many months since we’ve known that important precautions work to help keep COVID-19 at bay.
And now we have the COVID-19 vaccine. But distribution and inoculation in Rhode Island is pathetically the worst in the United States. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Rhode Island has given the first dose to just 9.2 percent of its population and has administered just 62 percent of doses the state has received.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTIn Rhode Island, unlike many places, most educators have been participating in in-school learning, which has meant facing risks and sometimes chaos every day. And they teach in some of the hardest-hit and most vulnerable communities for COVID-19. Regrettably, educators in Rhode Island have to get in line for the vaccine just like everyone else based on their age. They aren’t prioritized yet they provide what should be considered an essential service. Of Providence’s 1,990 teachers, only 15 percent are over 60 years old, so an overwhelming majority of the city’s public school educators are nowhere near being eligible for the vaccine. . Contrast this with at least 26 states, the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico, which have made some or all teachers eligible to receive the coronavirus vaccine.
This becomes even more important when you look at the number of positive cases among Providence educators and students. According to figures the union has received directly from the school district, from Sept. 9, 2020, through Feb. 16, 2021, there were 932 positive COVID-19 cases among teachers (175), students (587), staff/teacher assistants (167), interns/student teachers (2) and administrators (1). So many teachers are being quarantined that other teachers have had to step in and babysit in-school classes while simultaneously virtually teaching their own classes.
In Boston, teachers are being prioritized but were just bumped down to the third group in Phase 2 along with other essential workers. They should be higher up but at least they are accorded the dignity of being considered essential.
Unfortunately, the pandemic has ravaged communities of color while they face inequitable access to the vaccine. Of Providence public school students, 43 percent are Hispanic or Latino and 13 percent are Black. The state’s second-highest rate of infections is in the West End neighborhood of Providence, which has administered the lowest rate of vaccines in communities with at least 10,000 people. Yet in Providence’s most affluent neighborhood—the East Side—residents have received the fifth most vaccinations per capita.
We’ve had a horrible year of a White House administration downplaying and even ignoring the pandemic and students losing precious months of “normal” education. We want schools to be safe, educators and students to be well protected and families to trust school conditions.
The education of our children is an essential service. If we just pay lip service to this, we won’t get to where we should be in helping our children and our public schools thrive. When teachers and our most vulnerable communities are protected from the coronavirus, everyone wins.
Maribeth Calabro is the president of the Providence Teachers Union and a special education teacher at Nathanael Greene Middle School.
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