The Port Washington School District needs an inoculation against its own incompetence.
As the parents of a Weber Middle Schooler, my wife and I got an email at 1 p.m. on Tuesday, Sept. 19, informing us that our daughter’s meningitis vaccine was lacking and she wouldn’t be allowed in school the next morning. This was unexpected.
Some panic ensued. We emailed Weber to confirm the deadline. Confirmed. Could we just get a doctor’s note that she has an appointment to get the shot but not have to miss school? No. State law. No exceptions. But it’s very short notice to try to get a doctor’s appointment. Yes, it is.
We called our pediatrician. Her office was flooded with similar desperate calls. The earliest appointment would be 2 p.m. Wednesday, meaning she’d miss the whole day of school, including an accelerated math class where a single absence can cripple a student’s chances of staying ahead of the material. We asked Weber if she could go to school for a few hours pending the shot. No, no exceptions.
The emailing back and forth happened during an excruciatingly inconvenient time for the district’s phone system to fail, and took my wife and I considerable time out of our day to get anything straight.
Our pediatrician offered to come in early and give the shot herself at 8 a.m. Wednesday, which we managed with some minor rearrangements of our schedules. Our daughter made it to school in time for the last 15 minutes of her first period social studies class. She came home at the end of the day with stories of her fellow students being called out in the middle of class, attending as usual in the not-unreasonable expectation that they could come to school on the understanding that they’d get their shots as soon as possible. Instead they were told to stand up from their desks and leave with everyone watching.
The lesson learned by all of us is the inexcusable incompetence of the Port Washington school system.
My wife and I had reached out to members of the school board when the notice first came Tuesday afternoon, and they were helpful and clear about the mandate of state law. The law itself is clear that all necessary vaccinations must be completed in the first two weeks of school, a reasonable policy in a post-COVID world. This, however, is a failure of communication. That’s entirety on Superintendent Michael Hynes and his administration.
No parent could be reasonably expected to know such a policy, and in the frenetic first weeks of school even the best-informed parents can be forgiven for such a lapse. I can find no recent notification, emailed or sent home with my child, pointing out my error in time for us to schedule the necessary inoculations. The only notice we found was an email last May.
Dr. Hynes might object that the switchover from the Aspen online portal to the new one called Synergy complicated the notification process. This may be true, but the district has been planning this switch for many months and already delayed its implementation once over the summer. Surely a competent administration could have looked at the calendar for these first weeks and made accommodations.
Dr. Hynes could also deflect to other districts having the same problem with a statewide mandate, although this would deflate the Synergy defense, and still reeks of being an excuse rather than a reason.
We are better off than most. My wife and I are fortunate to have enough flexibility in our schedules that we could spend an afternoon fielding this crisis and then take an hour in the morning to get to the doctor. We’re familiar with the district and have friends on the Board of Education to explain the situation. And we have a long-term relationship with an excellent pediatrician who went out of her way to help us. We know our privilege, and we know that a great many of our neighbors were abandoned by Dr. Hynes and his administrators without it.
This is especially egregious considering the way this administration preens about its communication efforts. Mercifully, the weekly “Fireside Chats” were extinguished very recently, but surely the district can share crucial information in some other medium. Dr. Hynes rarely misses an opportunity to share banal social media memes, but substantive details that affect our kids’ ability to attend school don’t make the cut? Whether incompetence or indifference, in many other professions this failure would be a fireable offense.
My daughter is now fully vaccinated. This district needs to take further action to protect her and all the kids of Port Washington Schools from a more insidious infection.
Douglas Parker
Port Washington
