With the widespread availability of COVID vaccines we were all hoping for a return to a more normal school year.  However, with the Delta variant New York is returning quickly to levels of cases not seen since April (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#trends_dailycases 

Even more concerning is the fact that COVID is affecting more and more children.  Several hundred New York State children have had a rare, but serious inflammatory complication called MIS-C.  (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#mis-national-surveillance  Admissions of children under 17 to the hospital for COVID complications is climbing again, between Aug 1, 2021 and Sept 1, 2021 there were 2,416 children admitted to the hospital (https://covid.cdc.gov/covid-data-tracker/#new-hospital-admissions  And even for those children who are not hospitalized there are long-term consequences including memory loss and an inability to function well at school (https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/08/health/long-covid-kids.html  

At the Sept. 1 School Board meeting it seemed as though there was a reluctance to require staff to be vaccinated in part because of a concern about losing staff over the requirement.  But we must ask ourselves is keeping our kids safe more important than losing a handful of staff?  Vaccination of adults is a key strategy to protect children (https://www.npr.org/sections/back-to-school-live-updates/2021/09/03/1033691323/your-school-can-keep-delta-spread-to-a-minimum-by-using-layers-of-protection  And to share a quote given to me by a friend with children in another local school district:

“The less burdensome it is for an individual to do something that prevents harm to others, and the greater the harm prevented, the stronger the ethical reason for mandating it.” Alberto Giubilini, Senior Research Fellow, Oxford Uehiro Centre for Practical Ethics, University of Oxford

I ask the Canton Central School Board to require immediate vaccinations of all staff who are able to get a COVID vaccine.  It may be this action is too late to keep students in person for the entirety of the year, but at least we can say we used all the tools available to us to keep kids as safe as possible.