Let's make vaccines mandatory for teachers and eligible students

This column is an opinion by Jake Thompson, a high school student in St. John's. For more information about CBC's Opinion section, please see the FAQ.

It's a balmy day in late summer, you go for an afternoon walk in your neighbourhood and are greeted by the laughter of children enjoying their summer vacation. They skip back and forth in the front yard getting cooled off by the sprinkler that's pumping out freezing cold water from the old garden hose attached to the side of the house.

Their parents stand in the front window and call out, telling them it's time to go school supply shopping. The reality locks in: school starts up again next week for another year. It's back to the nostalgic madness of rushing out the door, breakfast in hand, to try and catch the bus before it moves along onto the next home.

The last two years have been nothing ordinary for anyone. However, the lockdowns caused by the COVID-19 pandemic have been especially hard on all of our school-agechildren and teens. The risk level has always been there for major outbreaks within our school systems, but now it's much higher due to the rise of the delta variant, among others.

When everyone shifted to online learning last winter in Newfoundland and Labrador after an influx of variant cases, we discovered that schooling via the internet (especially in high school grades) is not something that works for everyone.

Students were divided into two groups: one that thrived with the online learning experience, and another that didn't do as well. A lot of the students that struggled with the virtual education platform had just given up, and they stopped logging on to the classes.

In my books, it was a messy plan laid out by the Department of Education that didn't give our teachers enough direction to be able to complete their roles of educating young minds.

Disruptions took a personal toll

I was one of the many students that struggled. Not being there in the physical classroom made it extremely difficult for me to focus and do any learning at all. I wasn't alone, either; I heard the same from many of my friends. The government and school officials need to do everything in their power to make sure that we don't lose any more in school instruction.

Of course, one of the things that we have learned throughout this pandemic is that it is very unpredictable.

One of the ways we could ensure a substantial blanket of protection would be to make vaccines mandatory for all of our school staff and students that are eligible.

Memorial University has announced its plan for requiring vaccines for students and staff who will be on campus this upcoming fall.

Now it's time for school officials to do the same for our K-12 education system.

Here in Newfoundland and Labrador, anyone 12 years of age and older is eligible for their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine. Twenty-eight days later, they are eligible for their second shot as well.

The recent messaging from Chief Medical Officer of Health Dr. Janice Fitzgerald is that all eligiblestudents should aim to be vaccinated before heading back to the classroom. The same goes for our teachers and other school staff.

Every shot in the arm is one step closer

Some individual workplaces, like Air Canada, for example, have that they will require all employees and future hires to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. The implementation of mandatory vaccines at various companies has been accepted by most, but not all, with open, rolled-up arms.

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When the rollout started here in N.L., and the volume of available vaccine was smaller, some people found it was a somewhat slow and at times difficult process to get vaccinated, with confusionoverwho would have priority to get vaccinated first. Later, some second-dose appointments were automatically cancelled in an effort to move up the schedule.

It's now a much simpler process to get the shot. Just about anyone can go into a vaccine clinic and be done in a short time. There have even been pop-up clinics offered across the province this summer at venues like the hot spot downtown St. John's pedestrian mall and the newly minted Hump Day Market in Deer Lake.

Making vaccines mandatory for students and staff would not only protect those within the walls of the schools, but also at home. Having all students vaccinated lowers the risk of them bringing home the virus to an immunocompromised grandparent or a sibling.

We've heard it from our medical professionals:every shot put into an arm brings us another inch closer to beating the pandemic and returning to some sense of normalcy.

There's a poster that I can remember hanging on the corridor wall in my elementary school. It explained something along the lines of "When you miss one day of school, it can take up to three or more school days to catch up on the lost time."

I wonder what the poster would say about two years of disrupted learning?

If we make vaccines mandatory in schools, we are significantly decreasing the chance of another year of disrupted class time, while increasing the chances of student success.

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