Gov. Newsom plans to allot 75,000 vaccines per week to school employees throughout state

Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a plan Thursday to allot an additional 75,000 COVID-19 vaccines to those who work in K-12 schools every week throughout the state. These vaccines will be distributed through county offices of education beginning Monday.

“It basically offers another means for educators to get vaccinated and appears to be part of the governor’s strategy to ensure schools can open sooner, rather than later,” wrote Robert Meszaros, spokesman for the Kern County Superintendent of Schools, in an email.

The move comes after heavy lobbying from the education community to vaccinate teachers. Newsom created a new threshold for elementary schools to open in the purple tier — below 25 new cases a day per 100,000 residents — but many teachers say they don’t feel safe returning to the classroom unvaccinated. Pressure for them to return has increased as many counties, including Kern, have fallen below that rate. They have joined with administrators to lobby the governor to increase the vaccination rate.

How many doses any county, including Kern, will get or how soon it will make a dent in the roughly 25,000 employees who work in schools isn’t yet clear.

Meszaros said that Kern County is likely to receive more allotments than affluent counties, because equity will be a factor in the way vaccines are distributed. Those counties and school communities where there are students from low-income families, English learners and homeless youth will receive priority.

School employees currently working on site or who report within 21 days will also be prioritized.

Last week Newsom opened up vaccine eligibility to school employees. Since then, many of them have begun to receive or schedule shots either through their school district or through local providers. For instance, many Kern High School District employees are scheduling vaccines through Kern Medical while Panama-Buena Vista Union School District announced that it’s planning to vaccinate employees in their board room this Saturday.

Newsom’s new plan won’t interrupt that process or the current allotments in place. It’s meant to bring additional vaccines into counties to ensure that at least 10 percent of vaccine supply is going toward teachers, paraprofessionals, bus drivers, child care workers and administrators on site.

“Our top priority is getting students back in the classroom as safely and quickly as possible, and the expanded access to vaccines will build on the momentum and confidence that we can do so with urgency,” Newsom said in a news release.

Here’s how the plan is supposed to work: The Kern County Superintendent of Schools will get a certain number of codes for vaccination every week to distribute. Those codes can be used to get an appointment on the state’s new mass vaccination system called MyTurn. Currently, those appointments direct Kern residents to the fairgrounds in Bakersfield and the three new state-run sites in Arvin, Wasco and Rosamond, according to Michelle Corson, spokeswoman for the Kern County Public Health Services Department.

The county office will distribute those codes to public school districts, charter schools and private schools based on how many workers are working with students in-person and whether those students have been disproportionately impacted by the pandemic. The school district will then distribute those codes to staff who qualify.

Currently, the Kern County Superintendent of Schools has a survey out to help the office gather information to assist with the first week of distribution, Meszaros said.