Social Studies teachers Maggie Bowman, Michelle Baroody, and Dion Crushshon ‘88 were scheduled to get their vaccines on Feb. 20. Bowman explains, “You get entered into the system and you get randomly selected, and so [Baroody and I] were both selected last week to get our first dose of the vaccine, which was very exciting.”
Crushshon elaborates on the registration process explaining, “As teachers we register through a certain site, then I got an email from the Minnesota Department of Health that said if I was interested, I should sign up ASAP. Then there was basically a short window of time that I had to pick a slot to get in. Then they send you to another site where you have to register all of your information, and you have to have a school email, so blakeschool.org. Once you set the appointment, it automatically sets your second appointment for a month later at the same time so that you can get your second shot: so it’s a two-in-one. So once I did that, I closed it out, I had two emails that said appointment one and appointment two.”
Bowman, Baroody, and Crushshon were supposed to receive their vaccines with other Minnesota educators at the Convention Center in Downtown Minneapolis, however, due to the winter storms and shipment issues, their appointments were cancelled. Bowman shares, “We both got emails that said, ‘We’re so sorry, your appointment has to be postponed… we’ll find a new day.’” Baroody’s immediate reaction was feeling “so sad.”
Even though faculty are not required to report whether they have received or are planning to receive the vaccine, Crushshon reports that Blake’s nurses sent out a survey to all of the faculty staff asking, “have you gotten both, have you gotten one, or have you gotten none?” As of two weeks ago, only around five percent of Blake’s faculty have reported that they received a dose of the vaccine, however, they are still planning to meet Gov. Walz’s goal of all educators will have received their first dose of the vaccine by March 4.
Both Bowman’s and Baroody’s appointments are rescheduled for Feb. 27. This isn’t ideal for Bowman as she shares, “Unfortunately, there’s one event for me that I can’t miss in these three months and it happens to be this coming Saturday, which also happens to be the day that my appointment was rescheduled for, so I can’t do it. I just go back into the system until I get randomly selected again.”
When they received their first email notifying them that they would be receiving the vaccine, they were able to choose between Friday and Saturday. However, according to Baroody, in the rescheduling process, “The next email that we both got was just ‘Here’s your new appointment,’” with no choice in dates or times.
Luckily for Bowman, she still has a chance at getting an appointment: “The one upside is that I have my personal appointment link, so the person who I was emailing back and forth with said [that I] can sporadically go in and click on it and see if there are appointments available and just choose one.’”
