Monongalia County’s school district is set to vaccinate 1,500 of its middle-schoolers next week.
That’s how many 12-to-15-year-olds in the county have signed up for their first dose of the Pfizer vaccine, officials told Board of Education members Tuesday night.
“We’re pretty excited about it,” Deputy Superintendent Donna Talerico said.
The local announcement comes after federal clearance to start administering the shot to that population.
Another Pfizer shipment is set to arrive in the county next Tuesday, Talerico said.
After that, students will roll up their sleeves in clinics at their respective schools that Wednesday, Thursday and Friday.
Meanwhile, students 16 and older will receive their second Pfizer doses this week, she said.
Each needle, the deputy superintendent said earlier, is one more notch to normalcy.
“Normalcy,” as in herd immunity, she said.
“That’s the only way we get back to prom and sports and everything else.”
Getting back to the above means getting away from the coronavirus, which the county school district is having trouble doing.
A Clay-Battelle student who also attends classes at the Technical Education Center on Mississippi presented with a positive diagnosis Tuesday.
It wasn’t immediately known if any classmates or staffers were quarantined as a result.
The district ended last week with 187 students and four staffer in quarantine. That was after five students and a staffer tested positive.
Eddie Campbell Jr., Mon’s superintendent of schools, has long said it’s the resulting quarantines, and not the relatively low numbers of positive cases among students and staffers, that is having the most impact on the district as the pandemic holds on.
Last week, health officials reported that 76% of the state’s total cases of the California and U.K. variants of the virus were in Mon County.
There are 78,000 children ages 12 to 15 in West Virginia, Gov. Jim Justice said.
TWEET@DominionPostWV
