Teachers can get vaccinated, not professors
Four days a week, Summer Vertrees, an English instructor at Cumberland University in Lebanon, stands in front of her students, teaching through a face shield, worried the coronavirus is quietly wafting about the classroom.
Did a student catch the virus in a dorm? Or a study group? Or a party? Maybe. Could Vertrees get it from her husband, a nurse practitioner, and bring it to campus? It’s possible. Does this exposure make her eligible to get the coronavirus vaccine? No, it does not.
Vertrees, 38, is required to teach inperson classes at Cumberland University but is unlikely to be eligible for a COVID-19 vaccination for months – even if distribution accelerates across the state. While Tennessee is rushing to vaccinate most educators, Vertrees and others like her are not prioritized at all in the vaccine rollout plan.
Why? Because she teaches at a college, not a K-12 school. In Tennessee, that makes all the difference.
“We are prioritizing someone who teaches second grade, but not prioritizing someone who teaches a classroom full of adults that can come and go to the dorms or maybe a party and don’t go home to a parent who is being COVID-19 conscious,” Vertrees said. “It doesn’t make a lot of logical sense.”
Although Tennessee is now vaccinating teachers from primary and secondary schools across the state, professors and instructors at colleges and universities — many of whom are required to teach at least some of their coursework in person — are entirely absent in the state’s vaccination distribution plan. Tennessee leaders did not follow a federal recommendation to prioritize college instructors the same as teachers, so instead of being vaccinated with their fellow educators, professors must wait until they are eligible due to their individual age or health status, not the exposure they face on the job.
Teachers and college professors generally face similar exposure circumstances during hours in classrooms with students, but there are at least two reasons that professors likely face a higher risk. First, professors teach adults, who are generally more susceptible to the virus then children, and second, college students and college-age adults have been repeatedly identified as a frequent source of asymptomatic spread.
University leaders twice cited similar arguments in letters urging Gov. Bill Lee to add professors to the vaccine distribution plan, but those requests have not been heeded. The Tennessee Department of Health affirmed it is not considering adding professors as a priority in the vaccine rollout, at least in part because professors aren’t considered essential to preventing “learning loss” and keeping parents in the work force.
Tennessee officially opened vaccine eligibility to all teachers across the state last week, and as those vaccinations now begin in force, there exists a widening gap between the educators who feel safe in their classrooms and those do not.
Nowhere is this disparity more overt than at the state’s most elite college, Vanderbilt University, a cornerstone of vaccine distribution in Middle Tennessee.
Some of the state’s first vaccinations occurred at Vanderbilt University Medical Center, and the hospital is now the vaccination site for most of Nashville’s teachers – including some who teach online exclusively. While teacher vaccinations began on Saturday, Vanderbilt remains unable to give the same shots to its educators on the same campus.
“It seems to be a statewide strange decision,” said W. David Merryman, a Vanderbilt biomedical engineering professor who will likely wait months for vaccination.
“I’m not saying we should be at the front of the line. But we are as similar to K-12 teachers as probably anyone else, and the population we are exposed to is much higher risk of transmission than the K-12 students.”