Dear @Sherriff Alex Villanueva:
I write to you on Thursday, February 10, 2022, 48 hours after your letter was released. For the last 35 months, after being officially determined High Risk for Contracting COVID19 by my Primary Care Physician as provided by my health insurance provider, I have, to the best of my ability, sacrificed freedoms to which I am legally entitled, and frankly become accustomed to because I love the work serving educational and socioemotional needs of 18 to 24 year olds who have different-abilities. Although not a large population when compared to the people you and your officers took a sacred oath "To Protect and Serve", I had to be fully vaccinated, boostered, wear a mask ( now an N95 mask), wash my hands with soap and water, and maintain social distance/lockdown protocols. When my adopted pink-skinned Christian younger Brother, his wife, my pink-skinned, auburn-haired Jewish sister-in-law and my two brilliant and funny nephews, who, like their Uncle, Schoolcoach Vernon Nickerson, are Atypical ( on the spectrum of Autistic Behaviors) all contracted COVID19 ( and thankfully, fully recovered)... Wow, almost one year later and I still cannot get through a retelling of our shared history without crying and then Blepharospasming ( uncontrollable locking shut of both eyelids)*.
I need to also share that one of my students and their entire family contracted COVID 19 and were hospitalized. In August 2020, bedridden in their home and wheezing while breathing, she fully participated in her young adult's IEP. It is possible to be proud, pleased and grateful for their survival, grit and determination-- and horrified that anyone had to suffer!
All public essential services personnel must be vaccinated and boostered without exception as our state, our nation, and our world begin the long walk long journey over many days in a reality where through action/ inaction, acceptance/denial, information/'disinformation we human beings have chosen ENDEMIC COVID 19 within a Global public health Pandemic.
Best,
Vernon P Nickerson, MA
*- Sadly, because the two Ed.D.s who Administrate the LAUSD District Intern ( iCAPP) program took 18 months to grant me a legitimate double-time accomodation to complete a second Master degree going to their Night-time school one night and countless weekends and school breaks, and because KP Los Angeles Medical Center had to keep cancelling treatment appointments ( injections with botox in all four eyelids and my forehead, typically without anesthesia) due to COVID, LAUSD iCAPPs delay led me to conclude it would be suicidal to continue working with supervisors who could be so mindlessly cruel and inhumane, albeit all "nice and legal". Therefore, I resigned to live, thrive, and teach another day, 100% virtually only. You see, Sherriff Villanueva, quiet as it is kept, some students have better academic outcomes and behaviors in parent- monitored virtual settings augmented by homeschooling. Still others, who will never be able to be vaccinated because the currently available vaccines will kill them due to their permanent irreversibly immuno-compromised status. Living immuno-compromised/supressed is no joke nor is it in anyway comparable with those who could be vaccinated but legally request and are granted Religious Exemptions from ever being vaccinated. Me and my students will face death if we contract COVID 19, nothing less, nothing more.
So we have come to the proverbial fork in the road. I will happily and gratefully continue along the path where I am eternally grateful to Gov. GAVIN Newsom, LA Mayor GIL Garcetti, and THE LA County Board of Supervisors for having the courage and moral fortitude to make the extremely tough decision to terminate 4000 of your Public Law Enforcement team members. Sir, as you know, as we now ALL know-- COVID19 and all of its mutations and variants are transmitted via Airborne ASYMPTOMATIC Transmission-- sadly, tragically, any interaction with the unvaccinated could result in acute illness followed by choking to death, gasping for breath-- or surviving with LONG COVID, a chronic disease with known and unknown consequences of its own.
Conversely, Sherriff Villanueva, you write your disagreement with our elected leaders' decision in the best interests of ALL Angelenos. For me and the nine other Los Angeles County residents whose COVID 19 stories I have shed, your letter seems to suggest our acceptance of genocidal behaviors from your staff. Given an overwhelming preponderance of the evidence, i.e., accepting as a metric of that preponderance : 2,611,637 deaths in LA County as of 2.10.2022 and 29,263 of those deaths since last week, as well as countless shootings of mostly unarmed BIPOC fellow residents of LA County, I must ask you to reply in an open letter to Los Angeles County to these question:
Why are you in your writing, sounding so angry, frustrated, and belligerant towards the LA County Board of Supervisors? Why are you claiming in writing that their decision is politically motivated instead of compassionate and ethical and in accordance with WHO, CDC, and LA COUNTY PUBLIC HEALTH protocols and best practices? Why have you not yet acknowledged that the people that are being fired are free to secure employment at or above their current compensation packages in jobs where public safety is not an issue? Finally, why haven't you begun the massive task of recruiting, vetting, and making hire offers to the 4,000 replacements you must now train and deploy AND execute a management staffing plan to maintain service levels and response times that may need to include CA National Guard deployment ?
(C) VernonNickersonSchoolcoach 2022. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
