The Harwood Union school district is requiring its staff to be vaccinated against Covid-19 ahead of the upcoming school year.
The district appears to be among the first to issue such a mandate when it made the announcement on Thursday. All staff members must be vaccinated or provide proof of a negative test result once a week, and the district also outlined a comprehensive list of Covid-prevention measures for the upcoming school year, which will begin Aug. 26.
Other measures include masking indoors and outdoors when less than 6 feet apart, voluntary periodic surveillance testing and limits on large gatherings.
“Please know that the greatest fear school leaders have since Covid began is that we would lose even one student or staff member to this pandemic,” Superintendent Brigid Nease said in a letter to the community. “The only way we can sleep at night and move forward is to believe we did everything we could to prevent such a tragedy.”
The district covers Duxbury, Fayston, Moretown, Waitsfield, Warren and Waterbury and includes seven schools serving about 1,600 students, according Nease.
Nease said outbreaks at local summer camps and child care facilities prompted the school district to tighten measures for the fall as Covid cases surge across the state. Washington County, where the district is located, reported substantial community transmission with 90.74 cases per 100,000 residents on Thursday, according to the tracker from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The Harwood district may roll back restrictions later on if conditions improve, but Nease hopes its proactive approach will help preserve as normal a school year as possible.
“I’m concerned about the students’ mental health, their need to be with each other and their social emotional well-being,” Nease said in an interview. “The goal is to keep everything running smoothly and keep things open the five days (a week) and all of our co-curricular running so that kids can have that robust experience.”
The school district made the decision in conjunction with the local teachers union, and Nease said the response from staff members and parents alike has been mostly positive. She estimates that, of about 370 district employees, no more than 25 are still unvaccinated.
Nease said making decisions about this school year has been much harder than last year, when the state issued extensive guidance on safety procedures, kids were sent home in March and schools had five months to plan what reopening might look like.
This year, those decisions have been left to each school district. The state issued a two-page advisory memo Aug. 4 that recommended schools require masking as long as fewer than 80% of eligible students are fully vaccinated, but included no guidance on teacher immunizations. Last fall, the Department of Health and Agency of Agriculture provided schools with 41 pages of guidance.
“We had nothing much to go on this year,” Nease said. “The pressure falls to superintendents.”
While the state’s position remains vague, the Vermont-National Education Association — the umbrella union that includes the Harwood Unified Education Association — is not.
The union said earlier this month it would “absolutely” support requiring that school employees be vaccinated against Covid-19 or submit to regular testing.
“We have long said that vaccinations are the single most important way to ensure the safety of kids, educators and the community,” Darren Allen, a spokesperson for the union, previously told VTDigger.
But most Vermont schools have yet to follow the lead of the VT-NEA or Harwood. For instance, the Windsor Southeast Supervisory Union is not requiring staff vaccinations, but “we reserve the right to the option as we proceed,” Superintendent David Baker said in an email to VTDigger. Neither are Rutland City Public Schools, which will “follow the guidance of whatever the state’s recommending,” said Superintendent Bill Olsen.
As superintendents weigh their options, they are coming under increasing fire from parents and residents. Nease said she has received multiple angry voicemails and several lawsuit threats from parents angry about the Covid measures, and several other superintendents said they anticipate protests at the start of school or at upcoming school board meetings.
“We know that many in the community have different points of view on these positions and that some of them have become politically charged,” Nease said. “We’re just calling for patience and calm at this time and for folks to come together and have healthy, civil discourse where everyone’s voice is heard and, of course, respected.”
