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Education Oct 28, 2022
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Citing his previous order in another case that struck down the Los Angeles Unified student vaccination mandate, a judge has dismissed a legal action brought by two groups representing parents of nearly 1,500 Los Angeles Unified students who sought nullification of the same order.
In granting the district’s motion to toss the petition brought by the California Chapter of Children’s Health Defense as well as a second group, Protection of the Educational Rights of Kids, Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Mitchell L. Beckloff said Wednesday that he had ruled in another case in July involving the LAUSD that the Board of Education’s Sept. 9, 2021, resolution enacting the student vaccination mandate infringed on the authority of the state Department of Public Health.
Prior to the July ruling in the other case, the LAUSD postponed its mandate until at least July 2023, then subsequently announced it would not appeal Beckloff’s decision.
Attorneys for the two nonprofit organizations maintained that there were different issues in their case that needed to be decided, such as whether the LAUSD’s placement of unvaccinated students in independent study programs without the consent of the appropriate guardian or parent violated the state Education Code. But lawyers for the district maintained that the petition should be tossed because the July ruling made the groups’ case moot.
The judge also ruled that a second motion dealing with the sufficiency of the facts in the petition was moot given his decision to dismiss the case, but he did give the two groups a chance to file an amended petition anyway.
About 930 LAUSD parents are members of PERK and another 540 of CHD-CA, according to the petition filed in October 2021.
Before it was nullified under Beckloff’s order in the other case, the LAUSD student vaccine mandate required students 12 years and older, as a condition of continuing their in-person education, to obtain the COVID-19 vaccine by specified dates.
In their court papers, lawyers for the two groups in the current case argued that with no COVID-19 vaccine requirement prior to starting school with in-person learning in August 2021, LAUSD students had not experienced severe COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, or death.
“Given this, it is incomprehensible that a state that already has the lowest COVID-19 rates in the entire country without any vaccine mandate would insist on being the first state in the nation to impose a vaccine requirement on healthy teens and pre-teens as a condition to continuing in- person education, or why (the LAUSD) chose to impose this onerous and educationally disruptive requirement right in the middle of a school term,” the petition stated.
While Gov. Gavin Newsom announced Oct. 1, 2021, that the coronavirus vaccine was being added to other immunizations required for in-person school attendance, Newsom also recognized that the CDPH was the only proper agency authorized by law to add a new vaccine to the childhood immunization schedule, according to the petition.
“(The LAUSD) is neither the proper agency to add a new vaccine requirement as a condition to in-person education, nor did (the LAUSD) follow the proper procedures and necessary safeguards for doing so,” according to the petition.
