Here’s how N.J. school districts are helping teachers get COVID vaccines faster – NJ.com

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Marie Connor had resorted to getting up in the middle of the night.

After trying in vain to get a vaccine appointment during the day in recent weeks, the learning disabilities specialist in the Perth Amboy school district was waking up at odd hours to log on to her computer to snag an elusive spot at a vaccination site.

It wasn’t working.

“I don’t know all the ways to navigate the computer,” said Connor, who has worked in Perth Amboy schools for 16 years on the child study team. “I was really, really anxious and frustrated trying to get the appointment on my own.”

Then, she got a phone call from her school district’s human resources department earlier this week. They had arranged a time for her to get a COVID-19 vaccine Friday at Hackensack Meridian Raritan Bay Medical Center in Perth Amboy. She just needs to show up.

Like a growing number of public school districts in New Jersey, Perth Amboy has made a deal with a local health care provider to give priority access to vaccines to teachers and school staff.

“We apologize for the short notice, but certainly welcome the opportunity to quickly get these vaccines in the hands of those who need it the most,” Perth Amboy Superintendent David Roman and Mayor Helmin Caba said in a letter to school staff last week, saying some teachers could get their first shots within days.

The school districts in Newark, Paterson, Metuchen, Jersey City and Passaic are among those that have arranged appointments or special vaccination days for teachers and school staff. Several counties, including Essex, Monmouth and Mercer, are also setting aside days for teachers to be vaccinated at local sites.

The efforts, which have helped some teachers get vaccines more quickly, have raised questions as other essential workers and those with health problems still struggle to book appointments on their own. Some teachers have also questioned why some districts are making special arrangements for educators, while neighboring districts are leaving teachers and school staff to hunt for their own appointments.

The New Jersey Education Association, the state’s largest teachers union, is encouraging districts and municipalities to find ways to make vaccinating teachers a priority, said Steven Baker, the union’s spokesman.

“It’s a good thing that this is happening. We’re looking for as many options as possible,” Baker said.

Baker dismissed any questions about whether school district employees may be moving ahead of others waiting for vaccine doses. Transportation workers, probation officers, fire inspectors, migrant farm workers and people experiencing homelessness are among those who became eligible for the vaccine in New Jersey last week.

On Monday, warehouse workers, hospitality staff, postal workers, clergy and judicial system employees will be eligible for vaccine appointments, under the state guidelines.

Teachers were originally scheduled to become eligible for the vaccine in New Jersey on March 15. But Gov. Phil Murphy made all educators and childcare workers immediately eligible March 5 after President Joe Biden called for all teachers to have access to the vaccine.

“Educators in New Jersey waited longer than educators in the rest of the country to get vaccine priority,” Baker said. “We believe it’s appropriate that educators finally have a place in line.”

Daniel Hausman, a research professor at Rutgers University’s Center for Population-Level Bioethics, said the ethics of helping teachers and other school staff get their vaccines faster than others is complex.

“In many cases teachers have been able to work remotely and have consequently not had to bear the risks that grocery store workers and bus drivers have had to take. These workers have a strong claim to vaccination for this reason and also because they may be more likely to transmit the virus,” Hausman said.

“On the other hand, getting children back to school is of the utmost importance, particularly to less affluent families who have not been able to put together a good substitute for face-to-face public education,” he added.

Deciding who is right or wrong in prioritizing vaccines is a difficult call, even for a bioethicist, Hausman said.

“I’m inclined to think that there is a good case for prioritizing the vaccination of teachers, especially elementary school teachers, and reopening elementary schools immediately,” he said.

New Jersey has more than 116,000 full-time public school teachers and tens of thousands more support staff, administrators, school bus drivers, custodians and private school teachers. It is unclear how many of them have been vaccinated as Murphy pushes for more schools to reopen.

As of this week, about 90 school districts with about 302,000 students are still all-remote, according to the state education department. Several large districts have not had in-person classes in more than a year.

The remaining 721 districts are either fully reopened, using a hybrid schedule or have various schools using different methods, state officials said.

The governor said Wednesday he plans for all New Jersey public schools to be fully reopened by September with no option for students to continue remote learning.

“I want to unequivocal about this. We are expecting Monday through Friday, in-person, every school, every district. Obviously, if the world goes sideways, we have to revisit that,” Murphy said.

Pat Paradiso, head of the teachers union in Perth Amboy, said union officials pushed the district to arrange vaccines for school employees after seeing other districts making deals with local hospitals and vaccine sites.

“We saw this happening in other districts,” said Paradiso, president of the Perth Amboy Federation – American Federation of Teachers. “Our staff members have been having such a hard time getting appointments on their own.”

After more than a year of remote learning, Perth Amboy is planning to reopen classrooms April 21. That has put pressure on teachers, food service workers, the child study team, administrators and secretaries to try to get fully vaccinated, Paradiso said.

“We are very grateful that they are doing this,” Paradiso, who has taught in Perth Amboy for 23 years, said of the school district’s efforts to make everyone an appointment.

In Mercer County, Walgreens plans to open a pop-up vaccination site in Hamilton exclusively for educators on Saturday and again on April 3. The pharmacy will administer 1,000 first-doses of the Pfizer vaccine each day to exclusively to local school employees who have made appointments, the county teachers union said. Another set of pop-up sites will administer the second doses in three weeks.

The pop-up clinic was arranged by the Mercer County Education Association, the union representing the county’s 7,000 teachers and school staff, with the help of the governor’s office and state and local lawmakers, organizers said. Volunteers will help register people and provide crowd control.

Getting teachers vaccinated as soon as possible will ultimately help keep children and their families from getting the virus, said Grace Rarich, president of the Mercer County Education Association.

“We know safety must be the priority. Vaccinating our county’s educators and support professionals will not only keep them safer, but will also benefit our students,” said Rarich, a middle school science teacher in Pennington.

In Newark, about 2,000 school employees put in requests to be vaccinated before the state’s largest school district plans to reopen next month for in-person classes. The school district and the city contacted the state health department to secure doses for in-school vaccinations for employees, starting with a March 16 event in the gym at Barringer High School where the first 400 teachers and staff from around Newark got their first shots.

Essex County also set aside special reserved appointments all this week at its vaccine clinic at the former KMart in West Orange for teachers and staff working at public, private, charter and parochial schools. Teachers had to bring their school ID to prove they were educators to get the shots.

The Lakewood school district — one of the few that has had full-time, in-person classes all school year — set up a similar vaccine clinic for its teachers and staff earlier this month. The district partnered with CheMed Healthcare Center, a private, non-profit facility in Lakewood, and Ocean Health Initiatives to give about 400 vaccinations at its first educator clinic in the high school gym.

The goal is to get the entire staff vaccinated as soon as possible, local officials said.

“The more people that we can get vaccinated, the better,” said Dawn Hiltner, a spokeswoman for the Lakewood Education Association, the local union.

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Kelly Heyboer may be reached at kheyboer@njadvancemedia.com.