COLUMBUS – Amid nationwide COVID-19 vaccination efforts, groups in Ohio and elsewhere are feeling as though they have been overlooked and should have been counted among the high-priority groups close to the front of the line.
Police officers think they should have been given a higher priority. Only 13 states are currently allowing grocery workers to sign up for vaccines.
Early education teachers are also feeling left behind as they wait while K-12 schoolteachers and other staff are receiving vaccinations.
Among them are the 120 staff members at the Jewish Community Center of Greater Columbus, which provides care for over 300 kids from infants to 5-year-olds at three locations and where staff and students returned to the classrooms in June.
Nikki Henry, the center’s director of children’s programming says early childhood educators have been fighting for recognition as more than mere babysitters, described the decision not to include them in an early round of vaccinations as “heart-breaking” because they provided child care and educational services for the children of essential workers.
“We have doctors, we have nurses, lawyers, firefighters, police officers as parents. They need to be back at work. Our teachers came back into the classrooms to help them get back to work,” she said in an interview for Perspective.
“Seven hundred different groups – over 700 now – have sent us letters and indicated to us they want to go next. In fact, some of them have said ‘we want to go now’,” DeWine said during his Tuesday afternoon coronavirus briefing.
DeWine says his administration’s focus early in the vaccination process has been on the most vulnerable populations – those Ohioans over 65 or with serious underlying health conditions – as well as K-12 grade teachers so that schools can reopen on March 1.
He has publicly rebuked school officials in Akron and Cincinnati for backtracking on commitments they’d made to offer some form of in-person learning by that date.