DC schools’ COVID-19 vaccine mandate could hit Black students hardest

• Students in Washington, D.C., will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine. Only 60 percent of Black students in the same age range have received the shot.
• If the mandate is strictly enforced, it may put additional strain on minority communities. Students in Washington, D.C., will be required to get vaccinated against the coronavirus.
• The mandate may force many students back into remote learning situations. New Orleans became one of the few large school districts to implement a policy similar to that of Washington’s in February.

Students over the age of 12 in Washington, D.C., will be required to receive the COVID-19 vaccine in order to attend school, a decision that may be especially difficult for the city’s Black students.

According to the Washington Post, “our goal is that no child misses a single day of school,” Asad Bandealy, the chief of the D.C. Department of Health’s Health Care Access Bureau, said of the mandate. “That means we need to get started right away.”

Approximately 85 percent of the student population in Washington, D.C. between the ages of 12 and 15 is currently immunised against COVID-19, but only 60 percent of Black students in the same age range have received the shot. If the vaccine mandate is strictly enforced, it may put additional strain on minority communities, which have already been disproportionately harmed by COVID-19 policies.

According to one Harvard University study, closed schools resulted in significant loss of achievement for students during the coronavirus pandemic, particularly among minority and low-income students.

“Students in high-poverty schools that were remote for most of 2020-21 lost about 0.45 standard deviations in math,” Thomas Kane, a professor of education at Harvard and one of the study’s authors, said of the study’s findings earlier this year in an interview with the Harvard Gazette.

Kane claimed that achievement gaps widened in districts that used remote learning for more than three weeks, claiming that in-person instruction was a “critical piece of our social infrastructure that we had taken for granted.”

However, the vaccine mandate, which is among the strictest in the country, may force many students in the nation’s capital back into remote learning situations.

Students in New York City are strongly encouraged but not required to get vaccinated unless they plan to participate in certain athletic programmes, whereas students in Los Angeles will not be required to get vaccinated after the Los Angeles Unified School District delayed a mandate that was supposed to go into effect for the upcoming school year.

In February, New Orleans became one of the few large school districts in the country to implement a policy similar to that of Washington, D.C., by adding the coronavirus vaccine to a list of required immunizations for students over the age of five.

The nation’s capital has one of the country’s most unique public school systems, governed by the 13-member D.C. Council rather than a school board. According to Anne Liu, an infectious-diseases doctor and clinical associate professor at Stanford University, officials hope that mandates like the one in D.C. will help raise vaccination rates among children.

“I believe it is to the benefit of the children, teachers, and staff in the schools, as well as the rest of the city,” Liu said, describing higher vaccination rates as a “positive thing to work toward.”

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