More than 15,000 people hospitalized in Florida 2:22
(CNN) -
In the week before classes begin, four educators from Broward County, Florida, have died about 24 hours apart from complications related to Covid-19, according to local education authorities.
Three teachers and a teaching assistant died from complications related to Covid-19 in the period from Monday night to Wednesday morning, the president of the Broward teachers union, Anna Fusco, told CNN.
At least three of the educators were not vaccinated, Fusco told CNN affiliate WFOR.
The vaccination status of the room was not immediately known.
Broward County School Board President Rosalind Osgood was aware of the deaths of several teachers, telling CNN on Friday: "We received information on Tuesday that was communicated to us. I know of three of those teachers who died from covid in Broward County. "
"They also told me they weren't vaccinated," Osgood said when asked if three of the teachers weren't vaccinated.
Teacher deaths come just days before classes start in Broward County, one of the nation's largest school districts, and at a time when coronavirus cases are on the rise in Florida and other states, driven by the delta variant and low vaccination rates.
The confluence is reigniting debates about covid-19 mitigation strategies as we begin a new academic year.
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Broward County public schools have had 138 employees test positive for COVID-19 since Aug. 1, according to the school system's COVID-19 dashboard, which was updated Thursday.
Classes are scheduled to begin next week, according to the school calendar;
employees began planning on Wednesday.
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The school district is using funds to incentivize staff to get vaccinated, Osgood said.
"But there are a lot of people who haven't been vaccinated yet," he said.
"And it's becoming deadly not to get vaccinated."
"You have to get vaccinated," Osgood said.
"This disease will kill you or leave you with a life-long complication that will not only affect you, but also affect your family and the people you love and care about."
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The district had already made headlines in recent weeks for actions taken on mask-wearing mandates: Earlier this week, the school board voted to keep a mask-wearing mandate approved late last month, despite Gov. Ron DeSantis' decree effectively prohibiting such a requirement in school districts.
The decree, the subject of several lawsuits, required state health and education departments to establish standards that gave parents, not schools, the ability to choose whether their children should wear masks.
"The eight members of our board of directors are firm that we cannot have people in schools without masks," Osgood told CNN this Friday, "because we suffer the reaction of people dying from covid."
"You can't risk people's lives," he said.
"We firmly believe that the lives of our students and staff are invaluable, and we are not willing to play Russian roulette with their lives or risk losing people to having people in schools without masks."
- CNN's Shawn Nottingham contributed to this report.
Covid-19 Florida
