Massachusetts districts step up efforts to vaccinate students at school
Nearly 300 students signed up for Worcester s first at-school COVID-19 vaccine clinic Tuesday. Rosaphae Bruton, 12, receives her first Pfizer shot from nurse Herline Narcisse at Whittier Street Health Center in Boston. Pat Greenhouse/Globe Staff
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BOSTON (AP) Massachusetts school districts are stepping up their efforts to vaccinate eligible students before the end of the school year.
Nearly 300 students signed up for Worcester’s first at-school COVID-19 vaccine clinic Tuesday at Worcester Technical High School, The Telegram & Gazette reported.
Clinics are scheduled for Wednesday at North High School and South High Community School, and later this week at Doherty Memorial High, Claremont Academy and University Park Campus School, and Burncoat High.
Hundreds of Cape students age 12 and older have signed up for school-based COVID-19 vaccination clinics being offered over the next two weeks, local health and education officials said.
Barnstable County is supplying first doses of the Pfizer vaccine for clinics in several Cape school districts, starting Thursday at Monomoy Regional High School, Barnstable County Public Health Nurse Deirdre Arvidson said.
She said the county hopes to dispense 1,100 to 1,200 first doses in Cape schools between now and early June.
As of Tuesday, 159 people had signed up for the Monomoy clinic, 146 for a clinic being put on by the Nauset Regional School District and 103 for a Friday clinic at Dennis-Yarmouth Regional High School, for which registration was just made available Monday, Arvidson said.
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Where: Baseball field at Stony Brook Elementary School, 384 Underpass Road, Brewster
Key issues
Dog park: A citizens petition, Article 21, requests that the town devise a five-year operational plan for the proposed dog park, including maintenance and waste removal, before any town land is allocated. Article 8 appropriates $1,247,118 of Community Preservation Funds, including $185,000 to help create a dog park on 2.4 acres behind the Brewster Police Station. The Stanton Foundation will contribute $225,000 toward construction. The Friends of the Brewster Dog Park would raise $50,000 to help furnish the $460,000 park.
School choice: Article 27 asks Brewster’s Select Board to ask the Nauset Regional School District to reduce the costs of the School Choice program, freeze the number of School Choice students in the district and add no new ones for the next seven years. The school committee should also reset the tuition fees.
The rate of chronic school absenteeism shot up across Massachusetts this academic year, with many Cape districts surpassing the state average of 17%.
In Barnstable the Cape’s largest school district the percentage of students deemed chronically absent climbed to 28.6% through March, compared with 15.2% during the previous academic year, according to the state Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
In the Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School District, 37% of students were absent at least 10% of the time, more than double last year’s chronic absenteeism rate of 14.8%.
Statewide, the chronic absenteeism rate is four points higher than in the 2019-20 and 2018-19 academic years.