Hope for normalcy in schools builds as more Fort Worth students get COVID vaccine.

Troy Bell didn’t flinch Wednesday afternoon when a nurse stuck a needle in his arm. He didn’t even feel it, he said.

After the shot was done, the nurse handed Troy an egg timer set for 15 minutes, and he walked over to the other end of the Arlington Heights High School cafeteria, where a few dozen desks and chairs were set up. He took a seat next to his twin sister Faith Bell and waited.

Troy and Faith, both 16, were among the first to get the Pfizer vaccine during a series of vaccination clinics at high schools in the Fort Worth school district. Troy is a sophomore at Paschal High School. This year has been hard, he said. Both he and Faith have been in remote learning since the beginning of the year. Their parents didn’t want to risk sending them back to school in person, he said. But he’s felt isolated, cut off from his friends and from normal life. He’s only been back to school for track and basketball practices, he said.

Faith, a sophomore at Arlington Heights, said she misses normal parts of high school like Friday night football games and spending time with friends. She looks forward to a day, hopefully not too far in the future, when she can come back to school in person and not worry about wearing a mask. She expects she’ll be back when school starts again in August.

“I’ll have both my shots by then, so I think I’ll be good,” she said. “I’ll be happy to be back.”

With many students now eligible to receive the COVID-19 vaccine, school officials, students and teachers hope the district may be able to return to something like life before the pandemic soon.

Fort Worth schools hold Pfizer vaccine clinics

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention gave emergency approval May 12 for children age 12-15 to receive the Pfizer vaccine. The vaccine was previously approved for people age 16 and up. Imelda Garcia, associate commissioner of the Texas Department of State Health Services, said after the CDC announcement that Texas students won’t be required to get the COVID-19 vaccine. School districts aren’t allowed to create vaccine requirements that go beyond those created by the state health department, so the Fort Worth school district couldn’t require students to be vaccinated before they enroll, a district spokesman said.

The Fort Worth school district and Perrone Pharmacy will continue offering the vaccine at high schools during the week of May 23. Before the district’s most recent round of vaccination clinics began Wednesday, it had 3,000 doses of the Pfizer vaccine to distribute and planned to get more if that supply ran out. Officials from the city of Fort Worth had another 6,000 to distribute to Fort Worth students and their eligible family members at a clinic Saturday at the Bob Bolen Public Safety Complex.

Faith and Troy were among 169 people who got the first dose of the Pfizer vaccine Wednesday at Arlington Heights. Another 222 people got the shot at another clinic at North Side High School. Faith and Troy said they were nervous about getting the vaccine at first. They’d heard about possible side effects, and Troy was worried when he read the CDC and the Food and Drug Administration paused distribution of the Johnson and Johnson vaccine last month over concerns about blood clotting. But when the district opened its vaccination clinics, their parents decided they should take part.

Both said they were more at ease with the idea of the vaccine after they’d learned more about it. Troy said he’d feel safer going out in public once he had an immunity to the virus. Faith said she hoped the vaccine would put her closer to the point when she could go back to school in person. Remote learning hasn’t worked well for her, she said. Her grades have slipped this year, she said, and she doesn’t feel like she has the same level of access to her teachers as she would if she were at school in person.

COVID case counts are low in Fort Worth schools

Since Fort Worth schools can’t require students to get the vaccine before they come back in August, the district is doing everything it can to encourage students and their families to get vaccinated voluntarily, said Michael Steinert, the district’s assistant superintendent for student support services. The pop-up vaccine clinics at high schools are a big part of that effort, he said.

If COVID case counts in Tarrant County stay low and the district can continue to give families opportunities to get vaccinated and convince them that school is a safe place for their children, the beginning of the 2021-22 school year could look far more like normal than anything students have seen in more than a year, Steinert said.

“I feel really good about where we stand for the fall,” he said.

When children age 16 and up became eligible to get the vaccine, the district initially partnered with Texas Health Resources to make shots available to students in that age group. About 2,500 students got the vaccine through that program, he said. District officials also think many students got the shot elsewhere, although the district has no way to track those vaccinations, he said.

The fact that students age 12 and up are now eligible for the vaccine allows the district to begin to move toward normalcy, Steinert said. But he cautioned that it could still be months before the district’s youngest students can get the vaccine.

Still, Steinert said he’s optimistic about the beginning of the next school year. Transmission of the virus at school has been “very, very low, almost non-existent,” since spring break, Steinert said. Case counts in the district have declined dramatically, as well, according to the district’s COVID-19 dashboard. The weekly count of exposures and positive cases in the district has hovered between 30 and 70 since spring break, down from 716 during the week after Christmas break.

Those lower case counts, plus a growing number of teachers who are fully vaccinated, mean fewer teachers are out sick or teaching from home, he said. Declining case counts in the broader community also mean fewer students get exposed to the virus, so they don’t have to switch between in-person and remote learning as often, he said. The result is that students get more consistent instruction with fewer disruptions, he said.

Texas schools can’t require masks after June 4

The district will have one fewer tool to help control the virus’ spread by the end of the school year. On Tuesday, Gov. Greg Abbott signed an executive order barring government entities in the state, including school districts, from requiring masks. Public school districts may continue to follow their current masking guidelines until June 4. Fort Worth’s school year ends June 18.

The order comes days after the CDC released updated guidance recommending school districts continue to follow COVID-19 protocols, including requiring masks, for the remainder of the current school year. The guidance notes that children under age 12 aren’t yet eligible to receive the vaccine, and those age 12-15 only became eligible May 12, meaning most won’t be fully vaccinated before the end of the school year.

The agency issued that update just days after it released separate guidance recommending that fully vaccinated people can safely go maskless both indoors and outdoors.

Choir rehearsals and Google Classroom don’t mix

Melissa Cox, the choir director at Jacquet Middle School, said she had to revamp her class completely at the beginning of the school year. Since the beginning of the pandemic, public health officials have warned that singing in choirs is particularly risky because singers exhale more aerosol particles and droplets than normal breathing or talking creates. That guidance, plus the fact that many of her students were virtual, made it difficult to rehearse, she said.

At first, she tried having students at home sing with students in class through Google Classroom. That didn’t work, she said — video delays meant remote students and in-person students could never stay together, so those rehearsals ended in cacophony. And for remote students who were in households where two or three students relied on a wifi hotspot to participate in virtual classes, it was often hard to stay connected at all, Cox said.

Eventually, Cox came up with ways to make rehearsals work. She had students sing in small ensembles, spaced out at a safe distance, rather than with the entire choir. Sometimes she’d have students who were at school in person sing to the students at home. A few times, she had students record duets through TikTok. She tried anything that would keep them singing together, she said.

“We just tried to be as creative as possible,” she said.

Students lost sense of community during pandemic, teacher says

Cox is looking forward to the day when all her students are back in person and they can sing together without worrying about spreading the virus. She hopes her school will be able to get back to something like normalcy next year, although she worries anytime she sees a Jacquet parent share misinformation about the vaccine on social media. She also knows that vaccination rates have lagged in lower-income communities like Stop Six, where Jacquet is located.

Even though she’s found creative ways to make music this year, she knows her students have missed out on the sense of community that choir can give. During a normal year, her class can bring students together around the common goal of making music. It can give some students a sense of belonging that they don’t find anywhere else, she said. And it can give them an outlet to express their emotions — something that many students need right now, she said.

“Music touches the heart and the soul in a way that nothing else can, and I just want them to get that,” she said.

Cox has missed that sense of community, too, she said. She’s a performer by nature and thrives off human connections, she said. She misses seeing her students’ faces and building the kinds of relationships that have been nearly impossible to create this year. Those connections are one of the most fulfilling parts of the job, she said. As more people get vaccinated and COVID-19 case numbers continue to decline, she hopes she’ll have more of a chance to build those relationships with her students during the next school year.

“We get into this business for kids,” Cox said. “Not for fame, not for glory, but for kids.”

Fort Worth students look forward to ‘back to normal’

Troy Bell, the Paschal sophomore, said he hopes the situation will be better once school starts in the fall. He looks forward to seeing friends and family in the stands during basketball games. Playing in an arena with no fans has been strange, he said.

Troy also hopes there will be homecoming, prom and football games — ordinary parts of high school life that district officials have had to cancel or curtail during the pandemic. Being able to do all those things will feel like a welcome return to pre-pandemic life, he said.

His sister, Faith, agreed.

“I just want things to go back to normal,” she said.