The Los Angeles Unified School District will open its first COVID-19 vaccination site this week, with plans to inoculate only district employees ages 65 and over and those working at testing and vaccination sites for the time being.
Starting Wednesday, school nurses and licensed healthcare professionals will administer the Moderna vaccine at the Roybal Learning Center in L.A.’s Westlake neighborhood, Superintendent Austin Beutner announced during his weekly community update on Monday, Feb. 15.
Eligible employees will be notified to book an appointment, a spokeswoman for the district said. There are about 3,425 LAUSD school-based employees ages 65 and older, but the district has not tracked how many have already been vaccinated, she said. She did not say how many doses of vaccines the district will receive this week.
The district, which for some time has lobbied to serve as vaccination sites and wants to administer the vaccines to the community at large if supplies allow, is hoping to eventually open “as many school-based sites as possible,” the superintendent said.
LAUSD officials recently declined early access to vaccines offered by one hospital to district staff after confirming with the county’s health department that school employees under the age of 65 aren’t yet eligible for the doses.
Running its own vaccination sites won’t change how soon its employees will become eligible for the vaccines, but the district is hoping to make it more convenient for staff who already qualify to schedule their appointments and to get their shots. Officials also hope to help speed up the vaccine rollout to the general public as doses become more readily available countywide.
School employees under the age of 65 are part of the next group of essential workers to become eligible for vaccines. That could happen in the next few weeks, though they would be competing with millions of others also seeking first or second doses.
While vaccinating staff will be a key component to reopening schools in the nation’s second-largest school district, both district officials and the local teachers union have also insisted that the county’s transmission rates must fall further before conditions would be safe enough to have students and staff return to campuses. LAUSD has not announced a date for reopening schools.
Los Angeles County’s adjusted case rate of new daily COVID-19 cases has fallen dramatically over the past month and is nearing a point where elementary schools could potentially reopen within the next couple of weeks based on state and county guidelines. But Beutner noted that the impact of the virus hasn’t been uniform across different communities.
In December, the district, which runs its own COVID-19 testing and contact tracing program, reported that one in three students in some communities tested positive for the virus despite showing no symptoms and having no known exposure to the virus while the rate was about one in 25 in other neighborhoods.
“The average level in an area as sprawling as Los Angeles can be misleading, especially when compared to much smaller and less diverse communities,” said Beutner, who noted that up to three-quarters of students at some schools travel from outside the local neighborhood and come from communities where the infection rate is much higher or vice-versa.
Shortly after Beutner’s update on Monday, a car rally organized by the Students First Coalition of Los Angeles, which is demanding that schools open immediately, took place in downtown L.A.
About 100 cars circled the block around the county Board of Supervisors office, according to a volunteer with the organization. Although COVID-19 levels in L.A. County have always been too high to meet the state’s overall school reopening standards, some have felt that county officials have been too restrictive in policies related to limited school reopenings, which they do have some control over.
Representatives from the Southern California chapter of the American Academy of Pediatrics; L.A. School Uprising, which is comprised of parents from LAUSD; and school leaders from other school districts or private schools spoke at the event, according to a list of scheduled speakers.