Atlanta school officials are promoting COVID-19 vaccines as a way to preserve in-person learning. They say far too few eligible students have gotten the shots, especially in schools on the district’s southern end.
Atlanta Public Schools Superintendent Lisa Herring on Thursday called vaccine numbers “too low” and said vaccination events taking place this week at middle and high schools are a chance to change that.
Districtwide, 19% of more than 21,000 eligible APS students were vaccinated by late last month. The employee rate is about 58%.
“We have to see those numbers increase. We have to move beyond what might be the fears around choices to not vaccinate and do all that we can to educate and to also have some compassion around what fears might exist,” Herring said.
Schools opened last week, with masks required. APS said about 130 employees and students age 12 and older had gotten vaccinated as of Thursday morning at on-campus events held with the Fulton County Board of Health.
Herring’s visit to Jean Childs Young Middle School underscored the district’s challenge. Only 5% of the school’s roughly 600 eligible students were vaccinated as of July 27, according to data recently obtained by The Atlanta Journal-Constitution through an open-records request.
The southwest Atlanta school is just one of many where student vaccination rates lagged before classes began. Sixty percent of the district’s 41 middle and high schools had student vaccination rates under 10% as of late July.
But officials pointed to promising signs that those numbers could rise by improving access and providing more information about the shots. Nearly 50 doses had been given at Young Middle this week, they said.
Herring called the numbers in schools on Atlanta’s south side “especially concerning.”
“We also know that there are some additional barriers that we have to face in parts of our community, Black and brown communities as well, where we are intentional around how we educate and inform,” she said.
Added school board Chairman Jason Esteves: “Vaccine hesitancy in the Black and brown community is real, and that is being overlooked.”
Credit: Vanessa McCray
Credit: Vanessa McCray
Young Middle School eighth grader DeShaun Brightwell, 13, said she “was kind of iffy” before getting the shot. She said she’d heard all sorts of things about why you shouldn’t get vaccinated. But she said she wanted to be part of “keeping the community safe.”
Data showed only two sites where more than half of eligible APS students had gotten the shots by late July: Midtown High School, formerly known as Grady High, and Atlanta Neighborhood Charter School’s middle school.
At Midtown, 54% of eligible students were vaccinated. At the charter school, it was 58%.
Abraham Anthony, a theater arts teacher at Young Middle, just got vaccinated after months of uncertainty. He’d heard mixed messages about side effects, the vaccine’s effectiveness and how thoroughly it had been tested among African Americans.
He said it became more imperative “to be a part of the solution and less a part of the problem” after losing friends and family to COVID-19.
“Me being a teacher, I decided that I have to protect my students as well as myself and my family,” he said.
In response to the AJC’s public-records request, APS said “vaccination data for staff by school is not available.”
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