Beverly Schools Press To Increase Student Vaccinations

BEVERLY, MA — Beverly Superintendent of Schools Sue Charochak said increasing coronavirus vaccination rates among eligible students will be a primary focus of the district's mitigation strategy over the first few weeks of the new school year.

Charochak said the district will adopt the most recent Department of Elementary and Secondary Education guidelines with an indoor mask mandate for all students and staff regardless of vaccination status through Oct. 1. That new guidance, which was released Friday and authorized on Wednesday, would then allow districts to have the option of easing the indoor mask mandate for vaccinated students and staff if a school reached an 80 percent vaccination threshold for students and staff.

"Everywhere, everyone. throughout the summer, in all guidance that we got, supports the use of vaccine as the primary mitigation in all school settings," she told the Beverly School Committee Wednesday night.

The superintendent said that the district is well below that vaccination level as of the latest data. She said 72 percent of Beverly residents ages 12-15 are first-dose vaccinated, while only 54 percent of residents 16-19 are first-dose vaccinated.

"That's a relatively low percentage for the North Shore," she told the committee. "We have neighbors around us that are well over 85, 90 percent."

Charochak said her staff is working on a breakdown of vaccination rates by grade level that can be posted on the district's website to help gauge progress.

The district worked with VaxinateRx to hold two clinics for students at Beverly High School this week — the second of which was scheduled for Thursday from 5 to 6:30 p.m. — with Charochak saying that mobile vaccination units will be brought to the schools this fall.

She said her goal is to reach the 80 percent threshold for eligible students and that will "at least give us the opportunity to consider (altering) the mask mandate."

"I would love to, but we have a long way to go," she said of hitting that student vaccination goal by the start of October.

Wednesday night's meeting was scheduled to review and potentially vote on indoor mask rules for the district to start the year, but the updated DESE guidance made that unnecessary in the short term.

Instead, most of the meeting was spent going over the district's other mitigation strategies, which include physically distancing at 3 feet whenever possible, grab-and-go lunches, outdoor meals and activities when possible and adopting the state's new "Test to Stay" program that allows students who have had a close contact to a positive case while in school to stay in the classroom as long as they test negative daily for five straight days and show no symptoms.

Daily testing will take place at school and will require parental consent.

"Our goal during this whole (planning) process was to make sure that we get our kids in school and we keep them there," she said.

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(Scott Souza is a Patch field editor covering Beverly, Danvers, Marblehead, Peabody, Salem and Swampscott. He can be reached at Scott.Souza@Patch.com. Twitter: @Scott_Souza.)

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