Court rules LA school district’s vaccine mandate illegal

A Los Angeles County Court Tuesday ruled that the Los Angeles Unified School District’s (LAUSD) vaccine mandate is illegal. Judge Mitchell Beckloff struck down the mandate because a vaccine mandate is up to the state legislature to enact and not an individual school board. 

LAUSD’s Board of Education had voted to adopt the vaccine mandate in September 2021. The mandate required all students 12 and older to get the injections in order to come to school. Any student who could not provide proof of vaccination was “excluded from campus” and made to learn remotely. 

If the mandate had stopped there, the judge hints in his ruling he would have allowed it to continue. Instead, LAUSD was forcing unvaccinated children out of their schools and making them seek re-enrollment in others who had independent study programs. In one case, an unvaccinated student was forced out of his S.T.E.M. magnet school and had to enroll in another school within the district. 

School boards are given broad authority, but it is “not unlimited”, writes Judge Beckloff. A school board’s authority ends where it conflicts with the state’s authority. In this case, the California State Assembly has not yet included the COVID-19 vaccine within the ten vaccines students are currently required to get in order to attend schools. 

During the 90 days during which Judge Beckloff was deciding the case, LAUSD walked back their vaccine mandate, but still wrote an amicus brief to support the San Diego Unified School District (SDUSD) in their own vaccine mandate. 

Last month, America’s Frontline News reported on Jennifer Kehs, a Pennsylvania mother of five who recently became a member of the Oxford school board and has been blowing the lid off how the board operates. 

She recalls how the board was offered $6.4 million in federal funding under the American Rescue Plan for the 2022-2023 school year. In exchange for the funds, the district had to submit a Health and Safety Plan, a 12-page document outlining the district’s response to COVID-19. The Health and Safety Plan had to promise certain measures such as “universal and correct masking” of students in addition to social distancing and vaccine promotion in order to receive the funds.  

 Jennifer and one other board member were new and had not read the Health and Safety Plan when it was called to a vote. Jennifer requested that they at least postpone the vote until all members could review the plan, but was denied. The superintendent suggested to her that she make another plan for the district which would not be submitted to the State of Pennsylvania.  

 Jennifer and one other board member voted no on the plan but were outvoted.  

 “The money in that plan has strings attached to it,” she told Chris Stigall. “And I feel strongly that we should not be accepting that money in exchange for the rights and freedoms of our kids. The freedoms of our students that are in this district should never be for sale.”