Nearly four out of five students 12 and older in Los Angeles Unified appear to be on track to comply with the school district’s COVID-19 vaccination mandate, a spokesperson for LAUSD said Monday, Nov. 22.
Although students have until Jan. 10 to provide proof of full vaccination or a qualified exemption, and officials said they expect the compliance rate to increase in the weeks ahead, the latest update from the district raises the question of whether tens of thousands of students will, in fact, be forced to switch from in-person learning to the district’s online independent study program next semester if they remain unvaccinated — and whether that program can accommodate the influx of students.
The district had asked students to get their first of a two-dose COVID-19 vaccine regimen by Sunday and to get their second Pfizer-BioNTech or Moderna shot, or the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine for those 18 and older, by Dec. 19. Students must upload proof of their vaccination status before Jan. 10. Classes for second semester begin Jan. 11.
Students are on Thanksgiving break this week and will return to school next Monday.
“As families upload their vaccination records to our Daily Pass system, we expect the number of vaccinated students to increase once students return to campus on November 29 and as we approach the December 19 second dose deadline,” the district said in a statement. “As of today, 79% of students have a complete, pending, or partial vaccination record, or qualify for conditional admission or medical exemption.”
District staff are still processing the records of students who got vaccinated outside of school, as well as information about medical exemptions that came in over the weekend.
Students who are conditionally admitted to the district include those who are homeless, in the foster care system, are migrants, come from a military family, or have an individualized education plan as a student with a disability.
Students who don’t comply with the vaccination mandate would be switched over to the district’s City of Angels independent study program, which struggled to accommodate the high volume of students that signed up for the program this fall because they could not or did not wish to return to in-person schooling in the midst of the pandemic. City of Angels, which currently serves about 15,000 students, experienced about an 11-fold increase in enrollment year-over-year.
The district has been hit with at least two lawsuits over its student vaccination mandate.
In recent weeks, parents who oppose the mandate have also said on social media that they are contemplating pulling their children out of the nation’s second-largest school district altogether and enrolling their kids in private school or setting up learning pods and hiring teachers who are out of work or facing termination for not complying with their schools’ staff vaccination mandates.