The hard deadline for a second shot is December 19, three weeks before the new school semester begins. All students who don’t comply will be shunted into a remote, independent study program called City of Angels, which (per the L.A. Times) “has been beset by staffing shortages and instability. Parents of students with special needs have been particularly upset at the limitations of the program—and many students waited weeks before being able to receive any meaningful instruction.” At a current 16,000 students, City of Angels could be forced to triple in size overnight.

Remote learning, which was imposed upon most California schoolkids from March 2020 to August 2021 despite the Golden State’s famously temperate climate and generous outdoor school space, has been a well-documented educational disaster. A November 14 National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper on the pandemic and test scores led by Brown University economist Emily Oster found that (in Oster’s words) “Bottom line: losses are big, and much bigger with less in-person school.”…

Given that California public school teachers and staff are required to be vaccinated, that unvaccinated kids have been stubbornly resistant to even the Delta strain of COVID-19, and that the LAUSD’s weekly testing regime of all students and staff alike continues to show a microscopic positivity rate, an obvious question arises: Who, exactly, is being protected by mandatory student vaccinations?

If the answer is the kids themselves, that shows an inability to process risk, and to fully appreciate the provable damage of remote learning. If the answer is their families, surely having unvaccinated kids around the house more, instead of attending mostly COVID-free schools, is more of a danger. If the answer is the community or society writ large, then that’s a tacit admission that we’re punishing noncompliant students (as opposed to, say, noncompliant members of more powerful public sector unions) because we can.