State Sen. Mike McGuire helps acquire vaccine doses for Sonoma County educators

Hundreds of Santa Rosa school employees are back in line to receive coronavirus vaccinations this week, keeping the county’s largest district on track to reopen elementary school classrooms April 1, following a last-minute deal brokered by a North Bay lawmaker to procure vital doses of the scarce vaccine.

State Sen. Mike McGuire, D-Healdsburg, secured 1,500 doses for school employees from the state agency overseeing California’s vaccination campaign after a shortage of doses forced a weeklong closure of a Sonoma County clinic created to immunize teachers and other education workers.

“It’s great news for our county,” said Steve Herrington, Sonoma County’s superintendent of schools.

The infusion of vaccine is less than half the 3,700 doses that had been requested this week for the Sonoma County Office of Education vaccination clinic at Rancho Cotate High School, but they might be enough of a stopgap to keep the school calendar moving forward.

The 1,500 doses will be earmarked for elementary school employees of Santa Rosa City Schools and four other local districts — Bellevue Union Elementary, Bennett Valley, Rincon Valley and Kenwood — who were left hanging by the clinic cancellations.

Santa Rosa schools Superintendent Diann Kitamura reached out to McGuire for help Thursday evening, worried the shortage of vaccine would slow efforts to immunize teachers and torpedo the district’s plans to reopen elementary school campuses in five weeks. Working with Gov. Gavin Newsom’s staff and the state Government Operations Agency, McGuire obtained additional doses to resume vaccinations for Sonoma County teachers.

“Without his efforts, our plan for elementary children and vulnerable middle and high school students to return to in-person school on April 1st was in danger,” Kitamura said in a statement.

On Thursday, Newsom announced the state would begin to reserve 10% of its vaccine doses for educators and channel that supply through local education offices. The Sonoma County Office of Education quickly began building plans to distribute the vaccine.

By the time McGuire reported his breakthrough, the network was largely in place.

The county Office of Education sent out access codes to participating districts Sunday evening, and those entities will forward the codes directly to eligible educators. Santa Rosa City Schools will receive about 690 codes, with the other four districts getting proportionate shares, Herrington said.

All 1,500 doses are expected to be administered over the next eight days, at sites that will include the OptumServe clinic at the Rohnert Park Community Center, Kaiser Permanente facilities, the Oakland Coliseum and the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

Improperly distributed access codes have caused major snafus at large vaccination sites in California, including the Oakland Coliseum. Herrington said the state’s system for educators avoids that. Each code can be used to make an appointment exactly once on the state’s MyTurn.ca.gov website; it will be inoperative if forwarded after that.

Herrington said he has directed districts and schools not to provide an access code to any teacher, on-site administrator, school bus driver, campus janitor or food preparer who has expressed unwillingness to be vaccinated. The superintendent said most districts have been surveying staff and “we’re seeing 85-90% positive.”

The county hopes the flow of vaccine from federal government to states to counties will increase next week, allowing clinics here to flourish again. Local health officials have said Sonoma County has the capacity to deliver more than 40,000 doses per week, but has been getting 7,500-8,000 in recent allotments.

“We’ll be getting back to private schools, picking them up again next week,” Herrington said. “No one is going without vaccinations.”

Middle school and high school staff are expected to receive vaccinations later in SCOE’s rollout, as those campuses cannot yet open for in-person instruction. For that to happen, Sonoma County will have to qualify for the less restrictive red tier of California’s reopening plan. The county has been stuck in the purple tier, signaling widespread transmission, for months.

One group that is not being included in the allocation of the 1,500 doses secured by McGuire: child care providers and preschool teachers. That workforce, which had been eligible for the SCOE clinic, is expected to receive vaccinations there again when it reopens, said Melanie Dodson, executive director of Community Child Care Council of Sonoma County. But only employees of five Santa Rosa school districts are getting access codes this week.

Newsom’s decision to allocate 10% of the state’s doses for teachers was an acknowledgment of the isolation and educational stagnation many children are experiencing nearly a year after campuses across California closed during the early days of the pandemic.

The governor’s office said just over half the 50 states currently authorize vaccines for education workers, and that at least 35 California counties are actively immunizing that population. But Herrington noted that Sonoma is one of the few counties conducting its own shot clinic.

“We felt it was a key and essential part of getting schools reopened,” he said. “And we have the staff to do it. The county doesn’t.”

Newsom’s order calls for about 75,000 vaccine doses to be channeled toward educators this week, and more in coming weeks. The California Department of Public Health says the state has built enough capacity to administer 3 million weekly doses — a figure that would promise 300,000 for teachers and their colleagues — and lacks only the supply to fill the pipeline.

Recent FDA authorization of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is expected to boost that flow.

California will employ the MyTurn portal for its teacher vaccination effort. State officials say they will also use mobile units and mass vaccination sites in the effort. The Oakland Coliseum will dedicate four vaccine drives to education workers over the next two weeks.

It wasn’t immediately clear what percentage of vaccine doses in Sonoma County have been going to education employees. A SCOE representative said that 4,200 such workers have been vaccinated at the Rohnert Park High School clinic since it launched Feb. 8. That’s only about 5.7% of the more than 74,000 people who have been vaccinated throughout the county since then. But the SCOE spokeswoman said her office had no way to track employees who received their shots elsewhere, such as through their medical providers.

Newsom’s plan also calls for education-targeted vaccines to flow to counties and school districts weighted by equity, including the proportion of students from low-income families, English learners and homeless youth.

You can reach Phil Barber at 707-521-5263 or phil.barber@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @Skinny_Post.