By Fernando Cervantes Jr.

On August 31, Somerville Public Schools (SPS) hosted a virtual School Committee Meeting in order to review vaccination requirements for all public schools.

The meeting was attended by Superintendent Mary E. Skipper and Assistant Superintendent Chad Mazza. It focused on different policies of SPS such as vaccination requirements and school schedules.

Others in attendance included Mayor Joe Curtatone, Councilor Matt McLaughlin, and other Somerville School Committee members from different wards.

After initial pleasantries from members of the School Committee, minutes from the June 21 meeting were approved.

Following this, Mazza gave a district report that included a reflection regarding this year’s summer school program and an academic recovery update.

“All staff use core instruction, some of that is effective lesson delivery, high expectations for learning, frequent actionable feedback, there are many core pieces too, that can be explained in a future meeting,” Mazza said. “The big piece with our approach to recovery is, all students all the time, it’s not some students some of the time.”

Once these reports were presented and completed by Mazza, the school committee meeting moved onto debating vaccine mandates for staff.

The first of two policies discussed for the SPS Policy Manual was the staff COVID vaccine policy.

Most of the comments from the committee members concerned the amount of time that staff would be getting between the policy announcement and the deadline by SPS for full vaccination. One of these members was Laura Pitone from Ward 5.

“I’m just concerned that the 20th [of October] is not far enough out, because that really only allocates a week to communicate and for someone to schedule their vaccination,” Pitone said.

Director of Health and Human Services Doug Kress also commented on the availability of vaccines in the Somerville area and where to get the shot.

“We do have a couple of clinics that are upcoming, they would be available for staff, students and their families,” Kress said, “We will have another Pfizer clinic coming up on September 15, with the second vaccine on October 6th, giving you both those clinics for students as well as staff to be fully vaccinated within the timeline that you have in front of you.”

Mayor Joe Curtatone expressed his vehement opposition to pushing back the deadline for staff vaccination, mostly citing the urge and the need for people to get vaccinated.

“We’re urging everyone to remind everyone that more than 98% of all cases are of the Delta variant. We don’t have time. We were pretty transparent about what we were all collectively considering to be done, I’d be vehemently opposed to pushing it off for matters of convenience,” Mayor Curtatone said.

The Staff COVID Vaccine Policy passed unanimously 9-0.

Next in the meeting was the discussion of a policy that would require students to be vaccinated in order to participate in afterschool activities, most notably afterschool sports.

Michelle Kelly, Athletic Trainer for Somerville Public Schools, presented a recent survey of student-athletes about vaccination and gave statistics on the vaccination rate of high school student-athletes around Somerville Public Schools.

“We had 250 student-athletes from high school show up and provide physicals, 75% of those students are already vaccinated, another 10% of students have their vaccination scheduled at the doctor’s office and 1% of our student-athletes were not interested in being vaccinated. The rest of the students would get vaccinated if vaccinations were required,” Kelly said.

Following these two measures, the meeting focused mainly on approving grants for the Fiscal Year 2022 and approval and acceptance of donations from local organizations.

Minutes and more information on the August 31 meeting can be found on the SPS website.