LOUISVILLE, Ky. (WDRB) – Thousands of teachers and staff at Jefferson County Public Schools soon will receive their first doses of a COVID-19 vaccine, but exactly when Kentucky’s largest school district can begin gradually reopening classrooms remains unclear.
JCPS Superintendent Marty Pollio’s "best-case scenario" of starting a phased reopening strategy with students in preschool through third grade by mid-February now seems unlikely.
A copy of a presentation for Tuesday's Jefferson County Board of Education meeting shows JCPS administrators believe the first round of vaccinations for local educators will begin by the first week of February, give or take a week.
The district expects employees who take a COVID-19 vaccine will get a booster shot three to four weeks after their initial doses, and preschool programs and elementary schools are tentatively slated to reopen two weeks later based on previous discussions of a phased reopening plan at JCPS.
The school board is scheduled to discuss vaccine distribution and other topics during its Tuesday meeting. Board materials show 12,884 JCPS employees asked for a COVID-19 vaccine compared to 1,900 who declined in response to a district survey, and Pollio has said JCPS needs 10,000 vaccine doses for its staff before beginning a reopening plan with the school board’s approval.
Renee Murphy, the district’s communications director, said about 3,500 employees did not respond to the district’s survey. They were officially listed as declining a vaccine, according to Tuesday’s presentation.
About 500 contractors who work for JCPS have also said they want a vaccine, Murphy said.
School employees are in the second group of COVID-19 vaccine recipients alongside first responders and those 70 and older.
The first round of vaccinations is underway for health care staff and those who work and live in long-term care and assisted-living facilities, and Gov. Andy Beshear has said the state expected to have more than 99,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine and about 103,000 doses of the Moderna vaccine by the end of 2020.
Some of those vaccine shipments are still coming, he said Monday. Another 27,300 Pfizer vaccine doses and 29,700 Moderna doses have been allocated for Kentucky this week, and just 60,414 doses have been administered throughout the state so far, Beshear said.
"No question this has got to move faster, and we're going to make it happen," he said.
Murphy said JCPS is developing a distribution plan with the Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness for the nearly 13,000 district employees who want a vaccine.
Like other school districts, JCPS had to submit a list of employees who want to take a COVID-19 vaccine to the Kentucky Department for Public Health to secure doses.
“We’re working closely with state and local officials to see what that timing is going to look like,” she said Monday at Broadbent Arena, where the local health department opened a drive-thru vaccination site for the first wave of recipients.
JCPS is working with the health department on a similar drive-thru vaccination effort, according to Tuesday’s board presentation.
The district has not offered in-person learning since the beginning days of the COVID-19 pandemic in March, and some have suggested keeping classrooms closed until vaccines are available for school staff. Jefferson County has remained in Kentucky’s “red zone” for COVID-19 transmission since October.
Speaking last week, Beshear said the COVID-19 vaccine rollout will pose logistical challenges throughout the U.S.
Vaccinating the second group of recipients may take a month to complete and will depend on the federal government’s vaccine distribution schedule, he said. While the state could begin the second phase of its vaccine rollout as early as the final week of January, Beshear set a target starting date of Feb. 1.
"We’re building the airplane while we’re flying it," he said last week. "I am sure that there are going to be mistakes made all around, but right now we believe we’ve got the right plan building in the right way to distribute this vaccine equitably all across the state."
How quickly more than 13,300 JCPS teachers, employees and contractors can be vaccinated depends on the local distribution plan, Murphy said.
"We’ll see how many doses will be available," she said. "… We hope that things will move along as fast as possible to make sure we can get people vaccinated. We know how important these vaccinations are for our teachers and for our community.”
The Louisville Metro Department of Public Health and Wellness quickly booked 1,000 COVID-19 vaccination appointments this week. Dr. SarahBeth Hartlage, associate medical director, said the health department will expand the capacity of its drive-thru inoculation effort based on its early popularity.
"We’re actually scaling that up today based on our success this morning, so I would say that our deployment has been as quick as is feasible," she said.
The district currently expects 59% of families will have their children return to school when classrooms reopen, and 41% will continue learning from home based on the results of a survey that has an 87% response rate so far.
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