Vaccine ideas? Anyone, please
Needham superintendent helps staff navigate vax ‘Hunger Games’
‘I’m doing whatever I can to provide resources for our staff to get vaccinated.’
A Massachusetts school superintendent is crowdsourcing ways to help his teachers and staff fight through the state’s “Hunger Games” of a vaccine registration process.
“Hey, Needham, I need your help: If you’ve suggestions/ideas that’ll enable our staff — teachers, bus drivers, clerical/tech, custodial, nutrition services, & admin. staff — to get quick access to vaccines, will you let me know?” Needham Public Schools Superintendent Daniel Gutekanst tweeted on Saturday.
Teachers, school staff and child care workers become eligible to sign up for coronavirus vaccines in Massachusetts this week, though some have already been able to snag appointments through CVS’s federal pharmacy program.
With some 400,000 educators and staff able to sign up on Thursday — on top of thousands of other eligible residents still seeking shots — Gutekanst doesn’t want employees in his district entering the virtual arena unprepared.
“I’m doing whatever I can to provide resources for our staff to get vaccinated. I feel it’s a little bit like
DANIEL GUTEKANST Needham Public Schools superintendent
the ‘Hunger Games’ out there,” Gutekanst told the Herald. “I’m just looking for ways for them to feel some reassurance and confidence in returning to the classroom.”
Needham schools have been in a hybrid learning model, but are bringing K-2 students back fulltime beginning this week. And they’re anticipating the return of more grades as the state pushes to get all elementary school students learning in-person in April.
“My No. 1 priority is health and safety for students and staff, and I feel if I can do even a little bit of outreach to the community and get some ideas, I want to pass them on,” Gutekanst said.
Gutekanst said he’d received upwards of two dozen suggestions in the few hours since he posted his tweet, from tips on how to navigate sometimes glitchy websites, to volunteer groups helping people book shots.
“It’s important for all of our workers — cafeteria workers on the front lines serving food every day to our kids, our custodians who are cleaning up after them, our teachers and teachers assistants,” he said. “We need this protection.”
Gov. Charlie Baker — who expanded vaccine eligibility to educators and staff after President Biden challenged states to get at least one shot into the arms of all school and child-care workers by the end of the month — said the state will “designate specific days at mass vaccination sites” for educators to get their vaccines, possibly on weekends.
Still, state Sen. Rebecca Rausch, a Democrat who represents Needham, blasted Baker for leaving teachers across the state — and in his former hometown — scrambling for shots.
“It’s not fair for teachers to spend their already limited time searching mediocre-at-best websites to try and find appointments,” Rausch said.
The assault on the American republic is so unrelenting in Washington right now, it’s hard to single out any single Democrat overreach as having the potential to do the most damage.
But if I had to choose, I would pick H.R. 1, which is 800 pages of trying to make sure that no election in the United States would ever again be unstealable, if that’s a word.
It passed in the House last week on a straight party-line vote of 220-210. Not one Democrat broke ranks, now that the sometimes-freethinking likes of Reps. Dan Lipinski and Tulsi Gabbard have finally been purged from the party.
Here are just a handful of the provisions, used to such great success in a handful of blue urban districts in the presidential election of 2020, now to be codified nationally.
No voter ID required, anywhere.
No more requirements for mail-in votes to be notarized or signed by witnesses.
No more laws against ballot harvesting.
Same-day voter registration nationwide and 15 days of early voting — mandatory.
“Late” ballots would have to be counted for 10 days after the election.
Ballot harvesters working for far-left, George Soros-type groups could turn in unlimited — unlimited! — numbers of ballots.
Whatever the state laws require, convicted felons could vote in presidential elections.
H.R. 1 would also make it almost impossible to purge outdated rolls of dead, illegal or since-moved voters, you know, like the man born in 1820 who was still a registered voter in Michigan last November.
It expands automatic voter registration, such as signing up everyone with a driver’s license, even in Democrat states like California that issue licenses to hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.
Where are the UN election observers when you really need them? If Saddam Hussein had tried to ram through one-tenth of this fraud in Iraq back in the day, Jimmy Carter would have had a fit.
All of the above is just a tiny sample of what’s in H.R. 1 to make sure the Democrats never have to worry about losing another national election. In the Orwellian spirit of the times, H.R. 1 is known as the “For the People Act,” because it’s exactly the opposite.
You know, just as the “Affordable Care Act” made health care unaffordable, just as the “Equality Act” would give biological males the “equal” right to compete in women’s athletics, and just as in Massachusetts, the “Secure Communities Act” would have made everyone less safe by handing out driver’s licenses to fentanyl-dealing illegal immigrants.
As far as H.R. 1 goes, we are being assured that at least this time, we don’t have worry about the Democrats’ mad attempts to Third World our elections. You know, the filibuster rule in the Senate and all that. Personally, I’m not all that confident of Republican spine anywhere, but especially not in Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell’s caucus.
The fact that not a single House Democrat was willing to say no to this abomination tells you all you need to know about where that party is.
Remember, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, et al., still haven’t rounded up a majority of their caucus to sign off on their attempt to establish a “path to citizenship” for the 11 million illegal immigrants, who are probably more like 30 million by now.
The Democrats are terrified of basically repealing every sane immigration law written over the last 100 years, but have no similar compunction about doing away with every responsible precaution the states have taken to ensure fair and free elections.
In fact, H.R. 1 isn’t enough for a lot of these Democrats. Rep. Ayanna Pressley even offered an amendment to lower the voting age to 16, because teenagers today are so … intelligent? Well-educated? What?
Lowering the voting age went down, but not for lack of Democrat support. The comrades in the caucus supported it, 125-93.
As for felons being allowed to vote once they’re out of prison, that’s not even “inclusive” enough for the likes of Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders. Remember that during the 2020 primaries, Bernie said he supported the right of Boston Marathon bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev to vote from his cell at the federal Supermax prison in Florence, Colo.
Tsarnaev was a Muslim terrorist who immigrated here as an “asylee,” and who had lived in Cambridge on welfare, along with his entire family including his serial-killing older brother, until he decided to begin massacring native-born infidels.
Who do you suppose Tsarnaev would have voted for from death row last year? Trump or Biden?
The Democrats’ passage of H.R. 1 came the same week that two Democrat city councilors in New Jersey were indicted by a federal grand jury for alleged voter fraud, and as a state judge in Mississippi ordered a new municipal election in a small city after it turned out that 78% of the absentee ballots in the previous election were fraudulently submitted.
All these “reforms,” even without the blessing of the For the People Act.
Meanwhile, in Massachusetts, the new speaker of the House, 74-year-old Ron Mariano, is moving to extend universal mail-in voting here and the Republican leadership didn’t raise a finger in objection. In fact, Rep. Brad Jones, the $147,497-ayear minority leader, signed off on it.
Universal mail-in voting. What could possibly go wrong?