Newsom: Teacher vaccination mandate not necessary now.
Students, instructors still required to wear masks in school
A day after the state issued mandates that all health care be vaccinated against the COVID-19 virus, Gov. Gavin Newsom said Friday he has no immediate plans to require teachers to do the same.
“We’re confident in the approach we’re taking at the moment,” the governor said during a visit to an elementary school in San Bernardino on Friday to tout the return of in-person school.
California will require that teachers, staffers and students wear masks, and Newsom pointed out that the state has provided funding for schools to improve ventilation and deep cleaning and access personal protective equipment.
Newsom left open the possibility of some sort of future vaccine mandate, saying the state has not been “shy” about requiring health care workers to be inoculated against the deadly virus.
The governor defended the masking re
quirement, saying the state would “hold firm,” in response to a question about the Orange County school board’s lawsuit challenging the rule.
“We want to keep our kids safe,” Newsom said. “We don’t want our kids back on Zoom school.”
With the highly transmissible delta variant now surging across the state, the governor said California has not gotten enough people vaccinated and urged people to sign up for shots.
Also Friday, state officials announced a new $350 million incentive program to encourage health systems that serve people on Medi-Cal, which provides health insurance for low-income residents, to take steps to increase vaccination rates and close vaccination gaps. Medi-Cal participants are far less likely than the overall population to be vaccinated.
The state has administered more than 45 million doses, and nearly 77% of all eligible Californians have had at least one dose.
“We can end this pandemic. We could put this behind us in a month. It’s a choice, at the end of the day,” Newsom said, adding that if everyone were vaccinated, “we could take these masks off once and for all.”
Though children under 12 are not yet eligible to be vaccinated, health experts have said the best way to protect young people is by making sure the adults around them are inoculated.
The governor’s school visit came less than two weeks before California voters can begin filling out their ballots in the Sept. 14 recall election, where polling suggests Newsom stands a real chance of being unseated. Newsom has received nearly $2 million from the California Teachers Association to fight the effort.
Flanked by local lawmakers and state Superintendent
of Public Instruction Tony Thurmond, who heaped the governor with praise for his efforts to lead the state through the pandemic, Newsom said the state had passed a “transformational” $123.9 billion education budget that will provide kids with social-emotional support after more than a year of pandemic learning.
“We’re getting all our kids safely back into in-person instruction, and we’re doing it in a sustainable way,” he said.
Asked about voters considering backing the recall out of frustration with school closures, Newsom said he pushed to get students back to in-person learning last school year. Although many schools did at least partially reopen, many students and teachers remained in remote learning.
“We were not shy about that. We had a lot of folks with different opinions,” he said. “We battled on that front.”
Newsom pushed back at the notion that school closures helped drive the recall, framing it as a Republican-backed effort by Donald Trump supporters to put the state on an anti-immigrant, anti-science path.
“I hope people pay real attention,” Newsom said. “They would turn back all of the progress this state has made.”