Should NC teachers move to the front of the COVID-19 vaccine line?

A growing number of educators and public officials across the country have called for teachers to be moved to the front of the line for COVID-19 vaccines, in part so that schools can reopen more quickly. Teachers and their unions appear to have mixed feelings about the idea. While they want to protect educators in schools that already are open for in-person learning, they worry that other teachers might prematurely be bullied into returning to classrooms.

Should North Carolina make such a move? One of its U.S. House representatives, Alma Adams, was among 25 members of the House who penned a letter last month calling on the Centers for Disease Control to add K-12 educators and school personnel to the list of critical groups prioritized for the COVID-19 vaccine. The letter acknowledged that states ultimately make the call on the order in which its citizens get the vaccine, but Adams and the group argued that teachers and schools are “cornerstones” of their communities and deserve vaccine priority.

“When COVID-19 prompted abrupt shifts in instruction and school-based services, these professionals responded as they always do, by rising to the occasion, adapting, and delivering for children and families,” the letter said. “However, no remote learning can replace what serves students best: engaging, in-person instruction. That reality is even more evident in communities that face long-standing inequities in access to the critical resources – educational or otherwise – needed to support student learning.”

Adams, however, believes North Carolina is in “the right spot,” spokesperson Sam Spencer told the Editorial Board this week. “The NC Plan follows CDC guidance and defines those who work in the education sector as frontline essential workers – what our letter was pushing for,” Spencer said.

We agree. While there’s a critical need for teachers to be protected and students to have access to in-person instruction, we’re less certain about the benefits and costs of giving educators higher vaccine priority in North Carolina. Currently, teachers are part of Group 1b of the state’s updated vaccine distribution plan. That group is broken up into three parts, with people 75 and older going first beginning this week, followed by health care and frontline essential workers who are 50 years of age or older. Teachers are part of the last group of frontline and health care workers of any age, including first responders, manufacturing workers, corrections officers, public transit, grocery store and US postal workers.

Older teachers already are in the first levels of Group 1B. Moving the rest of teachers up would mean moving other individuals further back in the vaccine line, including people with more risk of becoming infected, being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19. The short-term benefits of doing so are iffy. The early stages of vaccination rollout have been slow, with fewer doses available to states than expected and distribution efforts just now ramping up. Given that the vaccine also must be taken in two doses weeks apart, the effects of vaccinating schoolteachers early might not be felt until well into the spring, experts say. That would leave school districts grappling in the coming weeks and months with the same reopening questions that dogged them in 2020.

We encourage school officials to protect teachers with safe working conditions, but also to consider research that has shown minimal spread of the virus in schools across the country, especially in lower grades. That’s why health officials have expressed confidence that schools are safer to reopen than first believed, and it appears to be why Cooper said late last month that he has no plans at this point to make changes to school reopening guidelines that allow elementary schools to be on Plan A, with middle and high schools on Plan B. That remains a good blueprint for N.C. school districts, and the governor, to follow.