The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Union wants teachers, staff vaccinated soon
CEA launches campaign to prioritize educators
Connecticut’s largest teachers’ union is ramping up efforts to convince state officials to prioritize COVID-19 vaccinations for teachers and school staff.
The Connecticut Education Association launched a campaign on Wednesday calling on the state to quickly inoculate educators.
“The vaccine will bring another layer of protection, along with other mitigation strategies, to all of the staff who work with our children every single day,” said Jeff Leake, CEA president.
The teachers argued that other states have already prioritized educators in their vaccination schedules and that getting vaccines into teachers’ arms in Con
necticut would help address the constant need to shut down schools when teachers are forced to quarantine after exposure to the virus.
CEA kicked off the campaign with a news conference featuring five Connecticut Teachers of the Year winners. The union also premiered a public service announcement advocating for vaccinating teachers to keep schools safe and open.
“Get teachers vaccinated as quickly as we possibly can,” Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s leading infectious disease expert, said in the video. “The idea of vaccinating
teachers is very high up in the priority.”
The Teachers of the Year said they all want to be with their students, but in-person teaching needs to be safe. The video ends with a link to a petition and the words ‘Vaccinate educators now.’
School staff are among the next groups eligible for vaccines, including front-line essential workers and people with preexisting medical conditions that put them at higher risk for COVID-19 complications, Gov. Ned Lamont said on Tuesday. The state has not released guidance regarding priorities within the broad groups.
A couple thousand teachers are already eligible for the vaccine because they are age 65 or older, a spokesperson for Gov. Lamont
told reporters last week. But Connecticut is not among the more than half of states nationwide officially rolling out vaccinations to educators.
“Teachers in many other states have been getting vaccinated for the past several weeks, yet here in Connecticut we haven’t even started,” said Kristen Record, a physics teacher at Bunnell High School in Stratford and the 2011 Connecticut Teacher of the Year. “This is really stunning to me.”
“If we’re going to prioritize in-person learning, then we need to prioritize getting vaccines into the arms of educators so that we can do our essential work safely,” she said.
The public agrees. In a new poll by Morning Consult and
Politico, most voters — 55 percent — responded that states should wait to reopen schools until teachers have received a coronavirus vaccine, while 34 percent think they should not. A majority (54 percent) also trusts local teachers’ unions to decide whether or not to reopen schools.
But recent U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention guidance prioritizes strategies including mask-wearing, hand washing and social distancing over vaccinations. The CDC said that officials “consider giving high priority to teachers in early phases of vaccine distribution,” but that “access to vaccination should not be considered a condition for reopening schools for in-person instruction.”
The CDC also advised that people who are fully vaccinated do not have to quarantine when exposed to COVID-19 within three months of being fully vaccinated and if they show no symptoms.
“Why is that very important?” said CEA Executive Director Don Williams. “The number one cause of school closures in Connecticut is staff needing to quarantine. So when we vaccinate school teachers and staff, we reduce school closures and the disruption that it causes for students and their families.
“If we want to keep our schools open in a way that’s safe for students, staff and their families, we need to vaccinate everyone who works in our schools,” he said.