More than 6,500 Pa. teachers, school staff vaccinated through state initiative so far

Pennsylvania officials on Friday reported that more than 6,500 teachers and school staff have received the Johnson & Johnson vaccine this week, through the state’s initiative to inoculate educators.

Twenty out of 28 intermediate units are now fully operational as vaccine clinics, with the rest of the units set to start their clinics over the weekend. Each clinic will operate between one and nine days, vaccinating kindergarten through third grade educators and support staff.

The length of the clinic will depend on the number of people who qualified for a vaccine and expressed their interest in each intermediate unit – based on the collection of around 240,000 survey responses.

“Standing up an operation of this scale in such a short amount of time takes tremendous collaboration across multiple agencies, and very deliberate planning,” Randy Padfield, director of the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency, said during a virtual news briefing on Friday.

Padfield said the intermediate unit clinics opened in phases in the last 10 days to allow more planning time for certain sites. Each intermediate unit received guidelines for site and facility layout, clinical practices and training to ensure maximum efficiency, Padfield said.

The implementation for the initiative with a separate infrastructure from the rest of the state’s vaccine rollout, Padfield said, was done “deliberately, to not impede or impact the ability of those individuals waiting to get vaccinated in Phase 1A through existing providers.”

Pennsylvania’s teacher vaccination initiative was announced March 3 to occur in two waves, beginning with elementary school teachers and staff. Officials on Friday repeated the goal that, contingent upon a second allotment of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, all educators in the state would be vaccinated by the end of the month.

“We don’t have a lot of certainty in the data; we always make sure that we can adjust those plans left or right as needed to be able to accommodate,” Padfield said, declining to give an exact target date. He said PEMA and the Department of Education have a working calendar but could shift depending on the timing and size of the next vaccine allocation. “We are anticipating that we will get additional Johnson & Johnson by the end of the month which will help us complete the education initiative.”

Noe Ortega, the acting secretary of education, said his department is working concurrently to adjust school reopening guidelines to come in line with recommendations for vaccinated individuals from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, with the goal of ultimately bringing all students back into the classroom.

“Our focus right now is to get student back into the classroom, and then add this rollout begins to move toward completion, we’ll layer yet another mitigation effort on top of this to make the environment safer,” Ortega said.

But Ortega said there would not be any directive to mandate schools’ return to in-person instruction, despite conceding the toll that instructional loss and isolation has had on students. Schools have been allowed to reopen since, he noted, and most have offered some degree of in-person instruction throughout the last year. The choice to reopen fully will remain a local decision, he said.

This is a state where local control matters in making those decisions, and this is how it’s been handled thus far,” Ortega said. “We recommend certain instructional models, depending on levels of transmission…and that will continue to be the way we approach school reopening in the commonwealth.”

Intermediate units and school districts in Western Pennsylvania have reported that their vaccine efforts are well underway, with clinics having started late this week, to continue over the weekend.