A judge has ruled Los Angeles Unified School District cannot require students to be vaccinated against COVID-19 — a decision with implications for large Bay Area public school districts that have adopted similar requirements.
Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Mitchell Beckloff’s Tuesday ruling is the second to find that a public school district lacks authority over vaccine requirements that are being set by the state. A judge in December ruled that a San Diego Unified School District COVID vaccine requirement exceeded its authority.
“The court finds the vaccines required of schoolchildren for enrollment and continued attendance in school in this state has been so covered by statutes within the Health and Safety Code that the field has become exclusively a matter of state concern,” Beckloff wrote in his nine-page decision.
Gov. Gavin Newsom in October said California would become the first state to mandate COVID-19 vaccines for school students, adding them to the list of 10 other already required inoculations for measles, mumps, rubella, chickenpox, polio, hepatitis B, bacterial meningitis, diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis.
The state requirement was to take effect first for grades 7-12 and later for K-6 once the Food and Drug Administration fully approves the COVID-19 vaccines, now given under emergency use authorization for children 6 months through 15 years old.
But in April, the California Department of Public Health said the statewide mandate would be put off until no sooner than July 1, 2023 because the FDA has yet to fully approve the vaccine for all ages within grades 7-12.
The same day, Sen. Richard Pan, D-Sacramento, whose bill, SB 871 would enact the state’s school COVID-19 vaccine requirement, put it on hold, citing concern that too many of the state’s children remain unvaccinated and in jeopardy of losing access to classroom instruction.
Pan, who authored controversial 2015 legislation disallowing personal belief exemptions from the state’s overall school vaccine requirements, did not include such exemptions for the COVID-19 vaccines in his bill, though Newsom had indicated that they would be allowed.
West Contra Costa Unified and Oakland Unified both adopted vaccine requirements that have since been delayed.
West Contra Costa Superintendent Kenneth Chris Hurst said in May that the district would align with the state’s current July 1, 2023 implementation date for its student vaccine mandate. The district had no other comment Wednesday on the Los Angeles Unified lawsuit.
Oakland Unified’s vaccine requirement for students ages 12 and up was supposed to become effective in January, but the school board in December postponed the effective date to late January, and then in late January to August 1, as thousands of unvaccinated students faced the prospect of being forced into a remote instruction program or disenrolled. The district had no response Wednesday to the Los Angeles ruling.
Los Angeles Unified on Wednesday said only that because the district had already aligned implementation of its vaccine requirement to the state’s July 1, 2023 timeline, all students are currently free to enroll and attend in-person instruction. The district said in a statement it “will continue to take measures to ensure the health and safety of its students, employees and school community.”
Sharon McKeeman, founder of the Let Them Breathe parent group in San Diego that has fought student face mask and vaccine mandates, said Wednesday the Los Angeles ruling will affect student vaccine mandates statewide. The group expects to win similar vaccine mandate lawsuits against Granada Hills Charter High School and New West Charter schools in Los Angeles.
“It’s clear that schools do not have authority to exclude students based on their COVID vaccination status and any academic communities that are segregating unvaccinated students are outliers who will be held legally accountable,” McKeeman said.
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Wow a smart Judge, Thanks Judge
Yea, and in LA Of all places?
Now as a response, just watch the Liberally educated socially government dependent California school teacher snowflakes melt down in pre-programmed fear, demanding remote teaching lest they catch a cold and go into a COVID pandemic panic. When I went to school in the 1950s my teachers were ex WWII DI-Drill sergeant Combat experienced warriors unafraid, who charged machine gun nests with only the cloth of their shirts to protect them,,,who passed on the true meaning of self-government to the kids through personal self-discipline and courageous example. This generation of limp wristed entitlement educators would faint at the offer of a hand shake lest it contain a germ. Hence no trust or agreements where one’s word is his bond, where now even reams of laws, contracts and legalese, cannot guarantee your child graduates with honors, let alone understand what the concept of honor entails. Maybe we can lock all the kids in a Germ free Hotel like Billionaire Howard Hughes did to himself and hire only clean Mormons to attend them. Howard died alone with his billions, without love, just a diseased kidney that had he got outside and lived would have contacted enough germs for his challenged immune system to learn to fight off what killed him,,,just as the human body was designed by God, not appropriated and contaminated for political purposes by self-god controlling political men.
Pity that’s only a Proverbial melt down…