Teachers are being vaccinated in southwest Illinois, but at vastly different rates
Mary Ann Cadell got her first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine Tuesday morning because she wants to do her part to curb its spread.
The high school teacher works with students who are deaf or hard of hearing at East St. Louis Senior High School, which has been conducting remote learning because of the pandemic for nearly a year.
For Cadell, getting the vaccine was part of a personal criteria for in-person learning to be done safely.
As essential workers, Illinois teachers are technically eligible to receive their COVID-19 vaccines, but it could still be weeks before some get their first dose.
Illinois has been in Phase 1B of the vaccine rollout — which includes school staff — since Jan. 25. But with a limited number of vaccines, many counties have had to further prioritize groups within Phase 1B according to their level of risk, beginning with the elderly.
Many teachers and other school staff have been going to work in-person for the majority of the school year. Even with staggered student attendance through hybrid learning plans, many staff are still in their buildings every day.
Vaccine supply not meeting demand
Liz Murphy White, a teacher in Signal Hill School District 181, received the first dose of the vaccine Feb. 3 at the mass vaccination site at the Belle-Clair Fairgrounds.
“I’m not over 75. I’m not over 65,” she said. “But I was able to get in to get mine before they started to really scrutinize.”
While in line, White said she was asked if she was a healthcare worker and she told them she was a teacher. She said she knows of other teachers in her district who have been vaccinated, as well as some who were turned away.
St. Clair County, like many in Illinois, is prioritizing groups within Phase 1B. The county started vaccinating people 65 years and older Thursday.
“We’re going to get to the teachers next,” County Chairman Mark Kern said during a daily COVID-19 briefing Monday.
Signal Hill is a small district, with 323 students in one building. Thanks to its size, White said they’ve been able to do face to face learning.
“I know that we’re lucky because we’re a small district,” she said. “I’m not naive, and I know we’re not like a lot of other, bigger districts [that have a harder time coming back safely].”
Mass vaccination for East St. Louis teachers
East St. Louis School District 189 was scheduled to vaccinate 350 of its staff Tuesday; another 200 are being scheduled for Thursday. The district is the largest in the metro-east, and one of the 194 school districts in Illinois doing 100% remote learning, according to the Illinois State Board of Education.
To their knowledge, District 189 is the first school district in the region to coordinate a large vaccination event with the local health department, East Side Health District, said Sydney Stigge-Kaufman, director of communications and strategic partnerships.
“I am grateful for the strong, meaningful partnership that School District 189 shares with East Side Health District,” Superintendent Arthur Culver said in a statement. “To coordinate a vaccination event of this magnitude for our staff members proves the dedication East Side Health District has for our community, staff and students.”
East St. Louis 189 is preparing to bring back its preschool and elementary students in early March. Stigge-Kaufman said bringing students back to the classroom and vaccinating staff were on separate timelines that happened to coincide at an “ideal” time.
The public health administrator for East Side Health District, Elizabeth Patton-Whiteside, said the health department covers two school districts besides East St. Louis: Lovejoy School in Brooklyn vaccinated staff on Friday, and she’s working on scheduling a similar mass vaccination site in Cahokia School District 187.
East Side Health District serves a primarily Black community, where many are apprehensive of the vaccine after generations of racism and mistreatment in the public health sector. Two of the most infamous cases of racism in public health are the Tuskegee syphilis study and Henrietta Lacks, whose cancer cells were taken for research without her knowledge or consent.
Patton-Whiteside said she’s been successful in combating myths and conspiracy theories about the COVID-19 vaccine, in part because the East Side Health District spends a lot of time in the community.
“They trust East Side Health District,” she said in the gymnasium of East St. Louis Senior High on Tuesday, while National Guard and contracted nurses guided school district staff through the vaccination process. “ ... They know I’ve had the vaccine. If I didn’t, they wouldn’t.”
Teacher vaccinations debated nationally
Since returning from winter break, the number of districts moving onto in-person learning has gone up. The number of COVID-19 cases among students has been much lower than the worst-case scenario projections made in the summer, but staffing issues have been a major hurdle for some districts trying to stay open. Most districts struggle to have enough substitute teachers to cover for the staff who are required to quarantine or isolate after potential exposures.
Nationally, unions representing teachers and other school staff have expressed concerns about returning to school and called for school employees to be prioritized for vaccination.
As of Monday, all teachers are technically eligible for the COVID-19 vaccine in 19 states, plus Washington D.C. and Puerto Rico, though many states are forced to further prioritize subgroups based on risk.
In another seven states, some teachers are eligible, pending age or location. Vermont and Rhode Island are prioritizing by age and health condition, not profession.
In Illinois, where teachers are already prioritized higher than they are in many other states, state union leaders have instead turned their attention to pushing for higher education faculty and staff to be prioritized to the same extent as K-12 teachers.
Illinois has had one of the slowest vaccine rollouts of the states, based on the percentage of the population. It’s in the bottom 10, according to the New York Times.
Illinois counties not vaccinating at the same rate
County by county, there are further discrepancies. Adams County has fully vaccinated 4.15% of its population, according to the Illinois Department of Public Health. Downstate, Alexander County has fully vaccinated just 0.33% of its population.
“It is disheartening to see the disparity between counties for the vaccinations of its communities,” said Kelton Davis, the regional school superintendent for Monroe and Randolph Counties.
School staff in the two counties Davis oversees are at drastically different points in the vaccination process. While some staff in Randolph County have already received their second and final dose of the vaccine, the administrator of the Monroe County Health Department, John Wagner, estimates it could be two or three weeks before the first school staff living or working in Monroe County are able to get vaccinated.
“We haven’t even had the first shot in Monroe County, and it’s not the health department’s fault,” Davis said. “Not at all.”
Wagner said the discrepancy between counties was worrisome, especially since his health department has the capacity to vaccinate people at a much higher rate than they are currently. They just don’t have the vaccines, he said.
In the meantime, Wagner said the county had to prioritize by age within Phase 1B, rather than opening it up all at once. St. Clair and Madison Counties are doing the same.
“Some of our most vulnerable population wouldn’t be vaccinated for months (if we opened it up to all of Phase 1B),” Wagner said.
Randolph County has three hospitals for fewer than 33,000 residents, which drove up the number of vaccines early on in the roll-out. With approval from the public health department, the county was able to start vaccinating teachers early.
Even when school staff are eligible to be vaccinated within their county, not all plan on taking up the opportunity.
In Madison County, between 25% and 35% of school staff indicated in a survey that they were not interested in being registered to be vaccinated, according to Regional Superintendent Robert Werden.
The survey did not ask staff why they didn’t want to register for the vaccine.
“Everyone has their reason (for not wanting to be vaccinated at this time),” Werden said. “I want to be respectful of those reasons.”
Edwardsville Community Unit School District 7 Superintendent Jason Henderson told the school board Tuesday night that Madison County will start Saturday vaccination clinics for educators this weekend.
In Monroe County, 659 school staff registered through the Regional Office of Education to indicate they wanted to be vaccinated. Stigge-Kaufman said the nearly 600 staff members being vaccinated this week included everyone who requested it in East St. Louis 189.
Waiting guidance on school reopenings
There is no official guidance yet, either from the CDC or IDPH, about how many school personnel will need to be vaccinated before in-person learning is deemed safe, or what percentage of students will need to be vaccinated. In the majority of states, including Illinois, whether school is taught remotely, in-person or a combination of the two in a hybrid model is a local decision made by the school board and superintendent.
Dr. Rochelle Walensky, the director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, said during a press briefing on Feb. 3 that the vaccination of teachers is not a prerequisite for safely reopening schools. Later in the day, however, White House press secretary Jen Psaki said Walensky’s comments were not “official guidance” from the CDC.
Walensky announced Friday that guidance on school reopenings will be released this week.
President Joe Biden said he’d work to reopen schools within his first 100 days in office, which would be by late April, more than a year after much of the country first shut down because of COVID-19. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious disease expert, has cautioned that reopening within Biden’s first 100 days might not be feasible.
For Chantel Crawford, a first grade teacher at Dunbar Elementary in East St. Louis, the vaccine will help her feel more comfortable with seeing her students in-person for the first time.
“Just thinking about it, I get emotional,” she said. Her students has missed all of the major holidays that are typically celebrated with classroom parties. For Valentine’s Day, Crawford said she’s making goody bags are communicating with parents to organize a drive-by system to pass them out.
Even in a normal year, Crawford said she usually gets the flu shot, because she knows that she’ll catch whatever her young students have. Given all the lives that have been lost to COVID-19 — around 465,000 in the U.S. as of Tuesday — she knew she’d get the vaccine as soon as she could.
“If you know better, you do better,” Crawford said.
This story was updated on Feb. 10, 2021 at 4:50 p.m.
This story was originally published February 10, 2021 at 5:00 AM.