No school on Monday, vaccines, former student fighting for life
prin...@sethigh.org
Dear Students, Parents, and Guardians,
- No school on Monday
- Minimum day on Thursday (10/7)
- COVID-19 Vaccine mandate and SET
- Benji, a former student is fighting for his life
COVID-19 Vaccine mandate and SET
I am sure that many of you have heard the news that San Diego Unified will be making the COVID-19 vaccine mandatory as soon as full FDA approval is announced for each age group, and on Friday, Governor Newsom announced that the COVID-19 vaccine would be added to the "TDAP" vaccines that are already mandatory in all public and private schools.
At SET, we are required to follow the California State law, but we are independent from San Diego Unified with an independent board and do not need to follow all San Diego Unified guidelines. Since the existing State law is that the COVID-19 vaccine is not currently mandatory, we do not have plans to follow the same vaccination schedule as San Diego Unified, but we will be required by law to make the vaccine mandatory when the State law goes into effect. The State law will make the vaccine mandatory for high schools once full FDA approval is secured for the COVID-19 vaccine for students who are in the 12-15 age range. Full FDA approval is currently available for ages 16 and up. The expectation is that full approval will occur sometime after January which means that the vaccine will be mandatory starting on July 1, 2022. It is possible, though, that the FDA approval could come in sooner and make the vaccine mandatory starting on January 1, 2022. This is not likely, but I want to prepare families for that possibility.
The reason that I will not be recommending to our board that we follow the San Diego Unified timeline is because:
- Our students and families have been taking our COVID-19 protocols very seriously and we have not had any incidence of COVID-19 spreading on our campus
- The potential litigation that could occur if we do something outside of State law is not worth the risk given that we do not currently have a COVID-19 problem on campus
I hope that this new law will not result in us losing any of our current students next year. The only education option that will be available for those students who do not qualify for an exemption (as defined by State law) who do not want to get one of the COVID-19 vaccines will be an independent study school. We do not currently have plans to offer a full-time independent study program, but this may change if there is demand and if we are able to provide a high-quality independent study version of our curriculum that includes the full richness of what we offer in person. Please be part of this conversation if you might fall into this category because we love the culture that we have created with our current students and would hate to lose any of them. We are restricted by law to only offer independent study to 20% of our students, so our primary focus would still be on in-person learning.
This is all new information, and like everything with COVID-19, subject to change, but I wanted to at least assure families that most likely nothing will change until next school year, regardless of what you are reading in the news.
Benji, a former student is fighting for his life
Please direct your thoughts and prayers to our former student, Benji, who is currently on life support fighting for his life. His mother has given me permission to tell his story so that no family has to endure this tragedy again. We have some juniors and seniors who will remember Benji, an amazing light who brought joy to the students and staff. The doctors suspect that fentanyl was in whatever pill he took. If you have not read about the fentanyl overdosing epidemic, please do. It only takes a very small dose of it to end a life, and drug dealers are adding it to all kinds of drugs to try to improve the high and get repeat customers. There are no illegal drugs that are safe from it.
Students, if you or your family do not receive a medication directly from a pharmacy, you do not really know what the medication is and it may kill you. Even if your best friend tells you it is clean, it probably isn't and it is not worth the risk. You should never be doing this, anyway, but now the stakes have been raised and you are risking instant death instead of drug addiction and a ruined life. This is happening daily. Please, please, please do not play this game. If it can happen to Benji, it can happen to any of you.
Parents, please talk to everyone you know about this. We have had students in the past who have been lucky. We need Benji to get lucky, right now, but we need the rest of our students to never put themselves in this kind of situation. I cannot emphasize enough that this is not just a "those kids" issue. Every child, mine included, could fall prey to this. It just takes one pill, taken one time during a lapse of judgment, to end a life. There is currently a 19-year-old stranger on Benji's same floor who is in exactly the same situation. There were 457 fentanyl deaths in San Diego last year. We cannot let this happen to our loved ones, and we need to protect all children across the US from this.
Some of the rumors yesterday were that Benji had passed away. There were other rumors that he was not going to make it. His family is still holding out hope and as of a few hours ago, there has been no change in his status which is good news.
Students, if you knew Benji and need someone to talk to, Mr. McClendon and I are available on Google Chat anytime this weekend and in-person during school next week. I will update the whole community if there is a major status change, but if you want even small updates, please reach out to me directly. We have reached out to the family to offer our school community's help, but spreading the word about fentanyl and preventing this from happening to another child is the only help Benji's family requests at the moment. Your thoughts and prayers will be very much appreciated, however.
Stay safe everyone.
Dr. McCurdy
