School fight escalates
Baker pushes in-person learning despite vaccine feud with educators
Gov. Charlie Baker doubled down on his push for getting kids back into classrooms a day after the state’s long-simmering feud with teachers unions over access to vaccines reached a new boiling point.
“Kids will do whatever it takes to be in school because they want to be in school,” Baker said Friday morning after touring St. Mary’s in Lynn with Secretary of Education James Peyser and Cardinal Sean O’Malley, and holding a roundtable with students who spoke passionately about the benefits of continuing in-person learning amid the pandemic.
St. Mary’s, like other parochial schools, has been open for in-person learning since August. Baker expressed optimism that more districts are in a better place now as COVID-19 cases fall and more schools enroll in the state’s pooled testing program.
“The work that’s been done by so many of the schools — public, private and parochial — that have been open is a real sort of laboratory for everybody else,” Baker added. “I certainly hope that many of the lessons that have been learned over the course of the first sort of two-thirds of the school year can be incorporated by others.”
Baker’s determination to see more students in classrooms is mirrored by educators. But the administration has clashed increasingly publicly with
teachers unions over the best way to go about it as the state mandates fulltime, in-person learning for elementary and middle school students beginning next month.
“We have to think about the health and safety of everybody at that building, the teachers, the paraprofessionals, the cooks,” American Federation of Teachers Massachusetts President Beth Kontos said.
Baker’s administration on Thursday rejected a
plan from teachers unions for firefighters to vaccinate educators and staff in their schools — and then blasted out a statement accusing the unions of trying to take shots “away from the sickest, oldest and most vulnerable.”
“I am not going to be in a position where I take vaccine away from people who are extremely vulnerable, who have multiple medical conditions and are over the age of 65 to give it to a targeted population,” Baker said in a press conference
that afternoon.
Kontos said Friday “we’re trying to do what’s right, and arguing with people who want to do something that’s convenient or politically correct just to please noisy people, that’s not really what I want to do.”
Baker moved teachers up the vaccine priority list after President Biden directed states to get at least one shot into the arms of all K-12 teachers, school staff and child care workers by month’s end. The state is setting aside four weekend days in March and April to vaccinate educators and staff at its seven mass vaccination sites.
State Sen. Jo Comerford, D-Northampton, said in a statement on Friday that “by forcing the reopening of schools” without a feasible safety plan, the state has “once again sidestepped their responsibility to responsibly ensure safety.”
Forcing educators and school staff to “scramble for necessary vaccinations” only adds “insult to injury,” Comerford said.