A post to support union efforts to open schools AFTER VACCINATION.
While waiting for a Whole Foods pick-up, I read an article about white people receiving a disproportionate number of the available COVID-19 vaccinations. Chicago has tried very hard to get those vaccines into communities of color. Other municipalities throughout the country are working on that as well; yet statistics show non-Asian people of color are getting shots at lower rates than white people. Despite best efforts, environmental racism has slipped again into the American picture.
In Los Angeles County, only 7% of Black residents age 65 and over have received their first vaccination, less than half the figure for white senior residents. “About 9% of Native American seniors and 14% of Latino seniors have received at least one dose.” (L.A. Latino, Black seniors fall behind in COVID-19 vaccine access compared with whites (msn.com) Some 17% of whites and 18% of Asian Americans have gotten at least one shot. Northern California mirrors this set-up in which blacks and Latinos have fallen noticeably behind whites and Asians in getting vaccinated.
From Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer (February 1): “An early look at the 17 states and two cities that have released racial breakdowns through Jan. 25 found that Black people in all places are getting inoculated at levels below their share of the general population, in some cases significantly below.”
Eduhonesty: Urban teachers and other teachers who work in poor areas — disproportionately areas of color — will not be surprised by these findings. I have watched the craziness associated with those shots unfolding, and I have known that the families of the kids I taught were going to get hammered by the COVID vaccination process. Nothing else was possible.
How do you get that shot?
Almost without exception, you go online. You go to the Walgreens queue, the CVS queue, or your county queue. You add sites for favorites, some with names like Service Dashboard (mhealthcheckin.com). And then you go back, over and over again until you happen to get lucky. You may post on neighborhood apps like Nextdoor to get tips. Who is getting shots? How are they doing this? You add yourself to random lists for clinics. Phone numbers exist on some of these sites but you have to get to the site to find the phone number.
My ninety-some-year-old parents took that computer offline maybe five years ago. It sits upstairs gathering dust, too complicated to manage now. My Episcopalian church has many members who have fallen out of worship services this year. They don’t do Zoom meetings. Some don’t have the technology necessary to do those meetings.
The students in my 99% poverty school did not normally have computers. Online activity happened on cell phones that only some students possessed. Parents’ phones could fill in gaps, but easy internet access simply was not there. Sometimes NO internet access existed outside of school or fast-food restaurants. And across America, many schools are empty or lightly populated, while students with school-issued technology sometimes sit in fast food parking lots. You can do the COVID shot search on a phone, but that search requires its own basket of background knowledge — one some parents may not possess if they grew up in that techno desert.
My school is 60% Hispanic, 30% Black, 5% two or more races, and 99% poor. That demographic background forms its own whammy in terms of getting vaccinated. Many parents in my district work multiple jobs, trying to get enough of a low wage to support themselves. They can’t easily haunt vaccine information sites. While Spanish language translations are generally available, not all immigrants are strong readers, especially if they come from rural areas of impoverished countries.
As to our Black families …
“’It’s frustrating and challenging,’ said Dr. Michelle Fiscus, who runs Tennessee’s vaccination program, which is doubling the doses sent to some hard-hit rural counties but is meeting with deep-rooted mistrust among some Black Tennesseans.” (Racial Disparity in COVID-19 Shots | The Portland Observer)
The ghosts of “The Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male” are with us still and will be with us forever. That experiment spanned forty years. People have not forgotten that untreated subjects were allowed to die.
Let’s throw in another few facts:
Poor families often have transportation challenges. How many afternoons did I stand with students in cold hallways in the Illinois winter as students tried to find some way home? They had stayed to study and did not feel up to a long walk in subzero temperatures. For liability reasons, the district did not want teachers driving students. We did not have an activity bus for stragglers. Some families remained without transportation for long periods, waiting to make enough money to fix a car that had been sitting idle for weeks or even months.
Uber and Walgreens are working together to offer free rides to vaccination sites for members of communities of color. (Walgreens and Uber team up to make sure underserved communities have access to COVID-19 vaccines – CBS News) Efforts like this can help solve the transportation crisis — and crisis it is likely to be. Unfortunately, people can’t simply drop into Walgreens for their COVID-19 vaccination. These shots are often being delivered en masse at special sites. Friends have travelled over thirty miles to get their shots. Some are even putting a 50 mile range into their searches. I can speak for the fact that Illinois has excellent public transportation between suburbs and Chicago (That transportation requires people to use trains and busses in COVID times, of course.), but moving between suburbs is much more complicated. Sometimes you have to go into Chicago to go out again, hopping from trains to busses and back again. It was 7 degrees outside when I went to get my groceries today.
Internet connections, transportation, and vaccine hesitancy all work against communities of color. Criteria for receiving shots matter as well. Many workers under 65 do not realize they might qualify for a shot due to the nature of their work. Others do not qualify. Restaurant workers and construction workers are category 1C in many areas, and do not yet qualify. For a broad update: Tracking the covid vaccine: Doses, people vaccinated by state – Washington Post
Eduhonesty: Meanwhile, an update on teachers from Covid-19 Vaccine Rollout: State by State – The New York Times (nytimes.com) shows teachers are now able to get vaccines (if they can find them!) in about half of our states. (Updated Feb 8)
This county-by-county free-for-all is going as fast as it can. I’d like to take a moment to thank those men and women who are working all day, jabbing shots into shoulders as quickly as circumstances allow. So many people have been working so hard to help us get ahead of this plague.
But I want to double back now to teacher safety and make an observation I have not seen specifically highlighted elsewhere. Chicago has been locked in a dispute with teachers about reopening classrooms. Other urban districts are fighting the same fight. One important fact about that fight out should be put out front and center:
Risk varies from district to district, depending on populations served. Teachers in some Chicago schools instruct students from highest-risk populations, those children without internet and working cars, whose parents don’t trust national vaccine roll-outs. The risk those teachers face is not the same risk as the risk of the so-called “average” teacher. High-risk families create higher risk, higher stress work environments.
Unvaccinated teachers with students living in multigenerational, unvaccinated households will be at highest risk — and Chicago, Detroit, New York and other areas still have many unvaccinated teachers working with these high-risk populations. The CDC observes that the rate of infection in school children is tiny, but that data cannot be trusted. We are not testing asymptomatic and sometimes even sick kids. We know that children can be asymptomatic carriers. Until we conduct robust tests for asymptomatic COVID within the school population, we will not have reliable data on student and teacher risk profiles.
Vaccinations are moving quickly now. How much will we gain academically by forcing teachers and students back into that classroom prematurely? This is especially true since many families don’t seem to WANT their children to go back. I talk to friends whose schools are open but operating at about 40% capacity or less, many of those absences not due to any district plan. Less affluent students often live in multigenerational households with parents who know that they and the kids are likely to be fine if COVID comes home from school, but grandma might be another story entirely.
One last thought: The stress level is incredible out there right now, with many teachers debating whether or not to finish out their contracts. “Should I stay or should I go?” The many social media threads say. What can get lost in reading those threads is that once that question is asked, departure will remain on the table for the future. What about next year? The year following? The subs pretty much vanished this last year, as I predicted. I expect in the next few years, many teachers will go as well. At some point, going back to school to become an ultrasound technician may seem a smart move, despite the costs of more college loans. I now follow a group specifically dedicated to helping teachers get out of teaching.
P.S. Meanwhile, readers living this modern version of the Old West, who have been lucky enough to get that shot or who are waiting for the County Sheriff to rescue you, may I ask if you can think of an elderly neighbor who might need your help? My brother managed to get appointments for my parents, but many of the elderly living on their own are simply lost right now. Do you know a friend or neighbor who can no longer navigate cyberspace?
Can you help?