NYC teachers with vaccine exemptions are being treated like pariahs

By Melissa Klein
March 5, 2022 | 2:10pm

They are unvaccinated and shunned.

New York City educators granted medical or religious exemptions from the required COVID-19 vaccination were mandated to report to school buildings Monday where some said they were treated like pariahs.

The teachers and other staffers who showed up at a building on Ocean Avenue in Flatbush were met with hostility from vaccinated DOE workers already at the site. The unjabbed were directed to one stairwell — forbidden to walk down the first-floor corridor where the vaccinated staff work, and forbidden from using their restroom.

Upstairs, those with exemptions made do with only a single toilet that flushed irregularly, or tiny children’s toilets, staffers told The Post. The kiddie commodes were replaced Wednesday night after they complained.

“The whole thing just reeks of discrimination and segregation. I never in my life have ever experienced something like this,” said a teacher who normally works on Staten Island and has a medical exemption for the vaccine.

The teacher, who had been working from her New Jersey home since October, says commuting to the Brooklyn site takes up to three hours one way.

A Staten Island administrator reporting to the building said the DOE also reassigned her from the regular duties she had performed from home since September to work remotely doing what she called busy work.

“I’m miserable because I’m not with children and I’m not with my teachers. I’m sitting here in a room not helping a soul. I feel like we’re being punished,” said the educator who has a medical exemption.

Another teacher assigned to the building, a former parochial school used for several years by the DOE but largely empty recently, said she suffered a concussion Thursday after a window fell out of its frame and hit her on the head.

She said the building was dirty and, with nine other people in a room with her, it was difficult to teach her special education students remotely.

“What they’re doing to us is just disgusting”she said.

To accommodate other teachers, the DOE rented the former St. Brigid School in the East Village from the Archdiocese of New York.

Source: nypost