Tracking Trump's executive orders: Vaccine mandates in public schools

Executive Order 14214: Keeping Education Accessible and Ending COVID-19 Vaccine Mandates in Schools

Signed: February 15, 2025

Key Provisions:

• Executive Order 14214 would halt “discretionary federal funds that directly or indirectly support or subsidize an educational service agency, State educational agency, local educational agency, elementary school, secondary school, or institution of higher education that requires students to have received a COVID-19 vaccination to attend any in-person education program”
• As it explains, “Given the incredibly low risk of serious COVID-19 illness for children and young adults, threatening to shut them out of an education is an intolerable infringement on personal freedom. Such mandates usurp parental authority and burden students of many faiths.”
• The Secretary of Education will issue guidelines to educational institutions about their obligations with “respect to parental authority, religious freedom, disability accommodations, and equal protection under law, as relevant to coercive COVID-19 school mandates”
• Within 90 days, it will create a plan to end COVID-19 school vaccine mandates and punish schools by withholding federal funding if they do not comply

Interfaith Alliance Counterpoints:

• Interfaith Alliance is deeply concerned with how Executive Order 14214 would affect educational freedom for our country’s students
• Instead of ensuring that schools are inclusive places for everyone, Executive Order 14214 would make schools less accessible for immuno-compromised students in the name of parental authority and religious freedom
• Interfaith Alliance believes that freedom of religion must not come at the expense of our other constitutional rights, particularly one’s right to decide how schools can best keep their students safe
• We cannot allow this administration to weaponize religious freedom to undermine public health.