SAN DIEGO — A judge ruled against the San Diego Unified School District's COVID-19 vaccination mandate Monday, saying that the district's mandate conflicts with state law.
San Diego Superior Court Judge John Meyer said in a tentative ruling Monday that it's within the purview of the state Legislature, not school districts, to mandate a vaccine for school attendance.
The Legislature has written laws to mandate 10 vaccines for school attendance, ranging from smallpox to tuberculosis. The Legislature gave authority to the state public health department to mandate additional vaccines such as the COVID-19 vaccine, and the Legislature said such new vaccine requirements must allow for personal belief exemptions, Meyer wrote in a ruling issued Monday.
The Legislature did not give such authority to school districts, Meyer wrote.
"The statutory scheme leaves no room for each of the over 1,000 individual school districts to impose a patchwork of additional vaccine mandates, including those like the (San Diego Unified vaccine) Roadmap that lack a personal belief exemption and therefore are even stricter than what the (state health department) could itself impose upon learned consideration," Meyer wrote.
Meyer's tentative ruling is a win for Let Them Choose, an offshoot of the anti-mask parent group Let Them Breathe that sued San Diego Unified in October to strike down the district's vaccine mandate.
The group has argued that San Diego Unified lacks the authority to mandate a vaccine on its own, and such mandates violate students' right to an in-person education.
San Diego Unified officials have argued that their mandate is needed to help keep staff, students and students' families safe by reducing the chances for spread of COVID-19 in schools.
In legal filings, attorneys for San Diego Unified have argued that state law gives school districts broad local authority and that school districts are charged by the state constitution to keep students safe. The school district's attorneys also argued that the state's health and safety code does not bar school districts from making their own local vaccine requirements, because the district's COVID vaccine requirement doesn't prevent students from complying with the 10 state law vaccine requirements.
Let Them Breathe has also said that personal belief exemptions must be allowed for any school vaccine. San Diego Unified has refused to grant personal belief or religious exemptions to students because families could abuse that exemption as a loophole to not get vaccinated, officials said. But the district allows religious exemptions for staff because it is required to do so under federal law.
Members of Let Them Breathe have argued that children shouldn't have to get the COVID-19 vaccine because they are less likely to get seriously sick from COVID. Let Them Breathe parents also doubt the safety of the vaccine, even though serious side effects from the vaccine are extremely rare and health experts say the benefits of the vaccine — reducing the chances of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19 — significantly outweigh the risks.
San Diego Unified's mandate required staff and students 16 and older to be fully vaccinated against COVID-19. Students had to get the second dose of the vaccine by Monday to meet the district's deadline of reaching fully-effective immunity by Jan. 4.
Students who don't comply would be barred from in-person school and extracurricular activities.
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