With just 2½ weeks left for Los Angeles Unified employees to comply with a COVID-19 vaccine mandate, not all district staff are fully vaccinated, raising the question of how many might be placed on unpaid leave or fired if they don’t meet the Oct. 15 deadline for getting either the second of a two-dose vaccine regimen or the one-dose Johnson & Johnson vaccine.
While the staff vaccination rate stood at an estimated 80% as of Tuesday, Sept. 28, a spokesperson for the district noted that the figure does not include employees already scheduled to receive their final dose before mid-October or workers who are vaccinated but haven’t uploaded their records to the district’s system.
“Employee vaccination rates continue to climb and we are seeing significant increases day over day and week over week. … In order to support employees and increase the accuracy of our data, we are holding daily vaccine clinics, and multiple sessions to help employees with the uploading process. We are confident that we will see the numbers continue to go up as we approach the deadline,” the district said in its statement.
If employees are removed from their positions for not being vaccinated, it could exacerbate the district’s existing staffing problems: Approximately five weeks into the school year, on or about Sept. 20, the nation’s second-largest K-12 system still had more than 3,000 job vacancies, including 622 teaching positions and over 300 literacy and math instructional aide positions, according to a report presented to the school board Tuesday.
The district further reported shortages in building and grounds workers (334 vacant positions), licensed vocational nurses (more than 150 vacancies) and special education support providers (39 vacancies). LAUSD is also looking to hire several hundred more attendance counselors or psychiatric social workers.
District staff also noted how far they’ve come in filling positions since July to meet staffing demands under the district’s Path to Recovery plan. This includes hiring more than 200 psychiatric social workers and 100 student and family resource navigator positions to provide referrals and manage cases.
Staffing up in order to provide the services that families are seeking for their children, after a year-and-a-half of distance learning for the majority of LAUSD students, is critical not just for meeting the needs of children recovering from a global health crisis, but to attract and retain students at a time when the district is trying to stem declining enrollment.
That downward trend is continuing this year, with 430,322 students enrolled in transitional kindergarten through the 12th grade, about 26,000 less than last school year, LAUSD’s chief strategy officer, Veronica Arreguin, told the board. District officials had initially projected 9,000 fewer students this year, but the actual decline proved steeper than they had anticipated, she said.
District officials acknowledged some causes for the lower enrollment may be beyond their control, such as declining birth rates or the area’s lack of affordable housing that’s driving families away. But board President Kelly Gonez also pressed for continued investments into early education programs as a way to attract and retain families in LAUSD.
Enrollment up in independent study program
While the district’s overall enrollment is down, its City of Angels online independent study program has seen about an 11-fold increase in enrollment this year, since many families have chosen to keep their children home in the midst of the ongoing pandemic.
About 15,000 students have enrolled in City of Angels, compared to 1,322 students last year, according to district staff.
Before this year, City of Angels was designed to be a program serving a limited number of students that needed a flexible schedule, such as child actors and elite athletes training for the Olympics.
But the demand for independent study swelled this year thanks to the pandemic. Even though 97% of TK-12 students are attending school in person, the remaining students enrolled in City of Angels are straining a program that’s been forced to ramp up capacity quickly.
Officials have acknowledged delays in getting students assigned to teachers, and in some cases, the frequent switching out of teachers as the instructors were reassigned to other students.
The district reached a tentative agreement with the teachers union last week which would facilitate the reassignment of teachers currently working at a school to the City of Angels online program to meet staffing needs there. David Baca, the district’s chief of schools, said he anticipated those reassignments to take place over the next three weeks.
“Based on our agreement with (United Teachers Los Angeles), we now have a path forward” to staffing City of Angels, he said.
Both UTLA and the school board still must ratify the tentative agreement.
Vaccination mandates
As far as the COVID-19 vaccination requirement for staff goes, a spokesperson for Service Employees International Union Local 99, which represents nearly 30,000 custodians, food service workers, bus drivers and other classified workers at LAUSD, said Tuesday that about 70% of its members are vaccinated and that the union is urging the district to extend the vaccination deadline to Oct. 31.
“We are committed to the health and wellbeing of all students as exemplified by the thousands of SEIU Local 99 members that, at great risk, worked in person during the pandemic to maintain schools and ensure students had access to meals, testing and vaccination,” the spokesperson wrote in an email. “But we need to ensure that there is a fair and balanced approach to how we achieve our goal of 100% vaccination at schools.”
UTLA did not respond to a query about what percentage of its members is vaccinated, though the union has endorsed the district’s vaccine mandates for staff and students.