A school district in Fairfax County, Virginia, announced Tuesday that they were returning to in-person learning, but had to hire hundreds of “classroom monitors” to watch the students as their instructors taught from home.
Teachers are refusing to return to school despite the fact that 90% of Fairfax County School District’s staff have requested or scheduled appointments to receive their first dose of the coronavirus vaccine. The staff is expected to have access to the second dose within a few weeks, according to a news release from the school district, meaning they will be fully vaccinated.
Fairfax County plans to do a phased reopening starting Feb. 16. All students who want to return to in-person learning will be able to do so by March 16, the school district said. The district has hired the majority of classroom monitors necessary to return but still needs 205 monitors to “cover in-person classrooms for instructors who are teaching from home.”
The teachers’ union Fairfax Education Association (FEA) originally said that teachers would be comfortable returning to classrooms once they were fully vaccinated, Fox 5 reported. However, they recently changed their tune and said that teachers would only return after staff and students had received both doses of the vaccine, which has not yet been approved for children. (RELATED: Unions Move The Goalposts On School Reopenings To The Detriment Of Children)
Fairfax schools says they’re going to open up 2 days a week in March for some kids. Wanna know how? They’re hiring thousands of unskilled classroom monitors to watch kids watch computer screens because their fully vaccinated teachers won’t return to the building. This is nuts.
— Rory Cooper (@rorycooper) February 5, 2021
Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Rochelle Walensky said Wednesday that teachers don’t need the coronavirus vaccine in order for schools to reopen safely, a statement that White House press secretary Jen Psaki walked back later the same day. The CDC found that in-school transmission of coronavirus was rare when schools took precautions, and multiple studies have suggested that children are less likely to transmit the virus than their adult counterparts.
Remote learning has proved to be devastating for students nationwide. In the Fairfax County school district, online learning hurt academic achievement among students and widened the gap between high and low-performing students, a study found. Student suicides doubled in one Nevada county.
The FEA did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Caller.