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Council member Christina Henderson (I-At Large) wrote the letter. A majority of the 13 D.C. Council members signed a letter Tuesday calling on Mayor Muriel E. Bowser (D) to mandate coronavirus vaccines — without a testing option — for all public school employees and day-care workers.

“I really want us to shift the conversation to talk about how do we get more Black and brown residents as homeowners in the District, because that allows us to establish some semi-permanent population, if you will, and then also helping those families build generational wealth,” says Henderson.

At-Large Council member Christina Henderson asked City Administrator Kevin Donahue what the process would be like, and if students would be tested without consent. “It is students who submitted consent forms,” Donahue said, though the target is still 10% of the student body. “So if you have some number of people who have submitted consent form, say it’s half the student body, they’ll still be … aiming to sample and test 10% of the overall student body. However, that 10% sampling will come from a smaller number of people,” he added.

Patrick Ashley, who leads DC Health’s emergency preparedness response, confirmed on Twitter Thursday that the city had made the option of booking a home vaccine appointment available to all unvaccinated residents. “Don’t have to be homebound in DC (recently changed),” Ashley wrote. “Just give us a call and we’ll come!”

But it also showed that the council’s progressive wing can now wield some power. Emboldened by the addition of new lawmakers Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) and Christina Henderson (I-At Large), the bloc successfully pushed through a tax hike on residents who make more than $250,000 a year to help pay for homeless services, early childhood education, and financial assistance for low-income families. (The same tax increase proposal failed last year.) They also helped fight off a last-minute request from Bowser for $11 million to hire 170 new police officers; the council gave her less than half that for cops, with the remainder going to violence interruption efforts.

Additionally, the auditor found that candidates who participated in the program were successful — Christina Henderson (I-At-Large) and Janeese Lewis George (D-Ward 4) won their respective races — and the usual dynamic favoring incumbents weakened slightly. “Between 2012 and 2018, incumbents won 77.3% of their elections for D.C. offices. In 2020, two of the six incumbents running for office were unseated by challengers,” reads the report.

And on a weekly call between the D.C. Council and the mayor’s office Friday, the mayor’s office told At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson that DC Health is not granting waivers at the moment. “I asked what metrics we need to meet to rescind the mask mandate,” Henderson wrote on Twitter. “They are hesitant to tie to any particular metric.”

At-Large Council member Christina Henderson asked for an update from the city regarding contacting unemployed residents to ensure they know about the federal resource.

If The Voter Ownership, Integrity, Choice and Equity (VOICE) Amendment Act passes, voters, starting in 2024, could choose up to five candidates for each office on the ballot and rank them based on their preference. If no candidate captures more than 50 percent of the first-choice votes, then the election automatically goes into a runoff. Henderson described ranked-choice voting as the ideal means of leveling the playing field for women candidates and those representing historically oppressed constituencies and marginalized political interests. Proponents have also argued that ranked-choice voting reduces negative campaigning and the influence of campaign funding while increasing voter turnout.

Henderson joined WAMU to discuss the fiscal year 2022 budget, including Tuesday’s first vote to raise the marginal tax rate on residents earning $250,000 or more to fund social services like housing vouchers for residences experiencing homelessness and higher wages for childcare workers.

“Races are more dynamic and collegial with genuine policy debates supplanting negative campaign tactics,” Ms. Henderson said. ● Many voters liked ranked-choice voting. In Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood, Andrew Wilkes, 35, a pastor and policy director for Generation Citizen, a nonprofit civic-education group, said he felt the system gave voters more choices and made it easier for candidates of color to enter the race. He ranked Ms. Wiley first among the five candidates he listed for mayor.

“Is it possible for you all to update your website that either DCPS reopened strong, regular DCPS site to provide information about the pediatric immunizations? Because (you) have, like, eight school-based health centers that can do childhood immunizations, and it was nowhere on your site. But it was on (the) DC Health site. I feel like that’s a small thing that you can give families information about,” Council member Christina Henderson said during the Committee of the Whole meeting.