LAUSD Delays Student COVID Vaccine Mandate Another Year

LOS ANGELES, CA — The Los Angeles Unified School District Board of Education agreed Tuesday to delay implementation of the district's COVID-19 vaccine mandate for eligible students until at least July 1, 2023.

Superintendent Alberto Carvalho announced in late April that he was recommending the delay, which aligns the district with state's timeline for imposing the student mandate.
The mandate for district employees remains in place.

The mandate — one of the strictest of any major school district nationwide — had already been pushed back. It requires eligible students to be vaccinated in order to attend in-person classes, and it initially had a December deadline. However, by December there were still 30,000 LAUSD students unvaccinated, and the board pushed back the deadline until after the current school year. Now, citing high vaccination rates, low transmission rates and advanced mitigation measures, Superintendent Alberto Carvalho in April urged the board to push back the deadline to be vaccinated one more schoolyear.

The move was lauded by vaccine-hesitant parents and students. The teachers union, on the other hand, has vacillated between insisting upon and urging a student vaccine mandate.

“We continue to support a vaccine requirement for all eligible students to keep our schools safer and to help protect the most vulnerable among us, including children too young to be vaccinated,” union President Cecily Myart-Cruz told the Los Angeles times last year.

Carvalho announced in late April that he was recommending the delay, which would align the district with state's timeline for imposing the student mandate.

"The ability of our system to pivot shows that we are a science-based school district and the health and safety protocols we adopt are influenced by the expert advice of our medical partners and public health officials," Carvalho said in a statement. "We know that students do best when learning in the classroom with their peers. Due to the high vaccination rates among students 12 and older, low transmission rates in our schools and our nation- leading safety measures, we have preserved in-person learning in the safest possible environment."

The district reported in December, when implementation of the vaccine mandate for students was delayed until at least fall, that the vaccination rate among eligible students aged 12 and over was nearly 90%. The rate among employees is even higher.

"We have high vaccination rates amongst our students 12 years and older and with our employees," LAUSD Medical Director Dr. Smita Malhotra said in a statement. "We have demonstrated low transmission rates in our schools with few outbreaks. And now, since the beginning of the pandemic, not only do we have the existence of therapeutics to deal with COVID-19, but scientists also have a greater understanding of this virus."

District officials said they plan to continue providing information about vaccinations and making the shots available to students.

When Gov. Gavin Newsom announced a statewide vaccination mandate for students, he said it would not take effect until federal regulators gave full approval of the shots. Thus far, however, the vaccines for younger children remain in circulation solely on an "emergency use" basis.

The LAUSD was planning to move ahead with its requirement regardless of the state, initially planning to impose it in December. But even with relatively high rates of vaccination among students, there were still roughly 30,000 who hadn't received the shots, meaning they would have been forced into online, independent study. The district announced in December it was pushing back the vaccine mandate until fall 2022.

City News Service and Patch Staffer Paige Austin contributed to this report.