The NFL has made clear what every football fan knows: Players are only as good as their ability to show up, a team only as strong as its time together on the field. The NFL has also made clear that playing well entails safeguarding the health and safety of everyone in the League. The result: Even vaccine-hesitant players understand that remaining unvaccinated undermines their team’s prospects.

As students head back to school, states and school systems should borrow a page from the NFL’s playbook and embrace consistent and high levels of vaccination among school staff and eligible students as the lynchpin to a successful year.

This aligns with President Biden’s path out of the pandemic, which calls for schools to increase incentives and requirements to get staff and students vaccinated. Biden was adamant that schools must aim to get 100% of teachers vaccinated. “Vaccination requirements in schools are nothing new,” he said. “They work.”​​ Some districts are aiming higher: The Los Angeles school board, which manages the second-largest district in the country, voted to mandate vaccines for students 12 and up.

As a network-based organization with franchises across the country, the NFL’s vaccination plan provides a useful model for schools to learn from as they build their plans this year.

COVID-19 is spreading fast among children, most often among children of color and low-income households. The number of children hospitalized due to COVID-19 has reached the highest level since the pandemic began. As more kids return to school, infection rates are climbing, and districts have had to institute frequent, widespread quarantines and whole-school closures.

Recent studies have shown that remote school is often no substitute for the classroom: Pandemic learning disruptions have left K-12 students an average of five months behind in mathematics and four months behind in reading.

We need a vaccination plan to keep our schools open for learning and the other critical roles that they play in their communities. What should that playbook look like?

First, school staff — teachers, cafeteria workers, bus drivers, janitors, administrators — must be required to get vaccinated unless there is a clear medical or religious reason for exemption. Those who do not get vaccinated should be offered frequent community surveillance testing.

Second, every school should utilize federal stimulus dollars to create a campaign to get members of their community vaccinated, including students, families, and neighbors. The access schools have to American communities is wide and deep: some have the physical reach to offer accessible vaccine sites to students and/or the wider community, and most schools have staff and leaders with the necessary trust, credibility, and empathy to talk one-on-one with vaccine-hesitant people and encourage them to do what’s necessary to protect themselves, their families, and their communities.

Third, we should educate. Let us not forget what schools do best: We have an unparalleled opportunity to teach our kids about the importance of public health, the science behind the virus and how vaccines work, and how to make sense of misinformation.

Finally, school leaders should develop plans to encourage vaccinations for eligible students. Whether this is by providing incentives, such as providing a gift card for submitting proof of vaccination or access to events and opportunities, or by mandating vaccines for students who do not have clear medical or religious exemptions, as the Los Angeles Unified School District has done. We also must prepare for the next change in COVID-related policy, particularly the possible upcoming emergency authorization of vaccines for children ages 5–12.

A school vaccine playbook, deployed across the country, would help keep our schools open and allow  us avoid a repeat  last year’s learning loss and social-emotional disruptions.

Students need consistency. Parents need reliability. Communities deserve to be safe. Schools need to prioritize vaccination as a linchpin to a safe and successful year. It’s unacceptable to settle for lower safety standards for our children than for grown adults playing professional ball.

The post What Schools Can Learn from the NFL Vaccine Playbook appeared first on Getting Smart.

Biden had reason to issue that plea: Today, up to 1 in 4 Americans say they won’t get vaccinated, and another 5 percent are undecided. To date, only about a third of the population has been vaccinated; America is in a race against time between new COVID variants and the pace of vaccinations. Without a more effective vaccination strategy that boosts the confidence of hesitant individuals of the safety and efficacy of FDA-authorized vaccines, we are unlikely to get back to normal—which Dr. Anthony Fauci says requires 70–85% of the population to get vaccinated.

Public schools can help: As trusted local institutions, our country’s schools are well-positioned with both the physical and social infrastructure needed to help hesitant Americans overcome their concerns and get vaccinated quickly.

The reasons for reluctance are as diverse as Americans themselves: Many people are worried about vaccine safety and side effects, others are dubious about the motives of the government or pharmaceutical companies, and many communities lack access to quality health information and convenient care. Unfortunately, as Americans vacillate over vaccines, variants are growing: The most common source of new infection in the U.S is the B.1.1.7 variant that’s more contagious, deadlier, and infecting younger populations.

The best way to boost vaccine confidence is through proximate, trusted, empathetic communication, and the best way to reach more Americans is to increase equitable access to vaccines. Schools can provide both, and they are, as yet, a nearly untapped resource in the vaccination effort.

Of all our public institutions, schools have the broadest and deepest reach into the everyday lives of Americans, from those in urban centers to those in rural outposts. Almost every community has a school nearby, even if its hospital is miles away. The reach of schools is also diverse and multigenerational, as students leave school buildings to return to parents, grandparents, extended family, friends, and other loved ones of every background, race, faith, and political persuasion.

Moreover, people trust school leaders, particularly principals. Teachers, social workers, school nurses, and office staff can leverage a foundation of trust to listen, understand, and respond to concerns of students, parents, and caregivers. School leaders are well-positioned to address delicate matters like misinformation, complacency, fear, and distrust of science and data.

There are several steps schools can take to address hesitancy and equitable access to vaccines in their local communities. A 10-Point Guide for Schools to Promote Equitable COVID-19 Vaccination outlines approaches and options.

The first is by taking a deliberate and empathetic approach to COVID-19 vaccination awareness and education. At Brooklyn Lab, a public school in downtown Brooklyn, New York, our staff start by listening, without judgment, to the concerns of our community. From this position, we’re able to begin addressing those concerns, both through one-on-one conversations and through broader communications such as town halls and newsletters.

Schools can also integrate vaccination information into curricula. In science and math classes, teachers invite students to understand the data behind the vaccine trials and use statistics, math, and science to place the risk of vaccines in context when concerns arise about certain vaccines, as has happened with Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca shots. In humanities classes, our teachers share and explore the history of medical racism that has contributed to vaccine hesitancy in some communities. They can explore successful campaigns to vaccinate Americans against polio in the 1950s or heroic efforts to use vaccination to eradicate smallpox globally in the 1970s. Teaching about vaccination history and COVID-19 in the classroom not only helps educate students with facts and science; it empowers them to become vaccine ambassadors with and for their loved ones.

Schools can also partner with local health organizations, governments, churches, businesses, unions, sports teams, nonprofits, or news outlets to run credible campaigns to educate their broader communities. To increase equitable access, schools can even offer their facilities as school vaccination sites, making it easier for working families, multigenerational households, or people in rural communities to have convenient access to a vaccine. President Biden said it: “Think of places that are convenient: School gyms, sports stadiums, community centers.”

This wouldn’t be the first time schools have served as vaccination centers; in 1954, the first polio vaccine was administered at a school in Pittsburgh and many individuals get their flu shots at their local schools. Some schools have done this during our current pandemic: Carmen Schools of Science and Technology partnered with the Milwaukee Health Department and four other schools to create a vaccination site for the school community. Within weeks, more than 80% of the staff had been vaccinated.

Some may argue that schools don’t have the time and resources to engage in the vaccine effort. Educators are overwhelmed trying to manage remote, in-person, and hybrid learning, while also supporting school communities that have endured unimaginable trauma and loss. This argument is valid, and schools do need extra support to take this on. But this is one of the greatest public health campaigns society has undertaken in generations, and yet even the most influential public health institutions don’t have the kind of local access we need to achieve herd immunity at scale. With the support of schools, we can reach more American communities.

Policymakers and government officials must support schools with the resources necessary to help communities overcome vaccine hesitancy and to vaccinate children when deemed safe. For American schools, vaccinations are a critical pathway to full reopening, and American schools might just be our next best shot for getting all Americans vaccinated.

For more, see:

• How Schools Can Promote Vaccination and Address Hesitancy: A 10-Point Plan that Puts Equity First
• Why We Built a Hub for Vetted Vaccination Resources for Public Schools
• Meeting the Challenge of Reopening: How Laboratory School Communities Can Power Human-Centered Design and Inclusive Innovation
• How to Reopen Schools: A 10-Point Plan Putting Equity at the Center
• To Reopen, America Needs Laboratory School
• Preparing to Reopen: Six Principles That Put Equity at the Core
• Preparing for a Healthy and Safe Return to School: Public School Facilities Planning in the Era of COVID-19
• Educating All Learners Alliance Launches Flagship Site, Shares Personas Educators Can Use to Understand Students’ Lived Experience During COVID-19

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The post Schools Can Give America a Shot At Vaccine Equity appeared first on Getting Smart.