District Getting Tough on Non-Vaccinated Students

From KUOW:

Seattle Public Schools said it is missing immunization records for about one in ten students.

The district sent letters to about 5,700 students’ families Oct. 28th notifying them that they will be barred from school beginning Jan. 8th if they still lack proof of the required immunizations, exemptions, or evidence that they are in the process of getting vaccinated.

District spokesperson Tim Robinson said after this week's pre-exclusion letter went out, translated into several languages, many families have followed up to update their records. The district advised families that 29 school-based health centers offer vaccinations, as well as primary health care providers and local pharmacies.

The letter also linked to exemption forms on the state health department website. Earlier this year, the state legislature removed the personal exemption for the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine, leaving only religious or medical exemptions as options for that immunization. Personal or philosophical exemptions are still allowed for other vaccines.

Other districts seem to be moving faster on this issue but with Seattle being the largest in the state, perhaps that's par for the course.

On the challenges of who is and isn't vaccinated:

In an October interview, Hoag said the district has not excluded students due to lack of immunization records for more than two decades "because it's so important that kids are in school, and we don't want to have relationships with families that are based on threatening them that their kid can't go to school."

Like many districts, Seattle is now getting stricter after measles outbreaks earlier this year sickened dozens across the state – mostly children. “If we have a measles case, we want to be able to tell the health department ‘these are the kids that are out of compliance,’” Hoag said. “What we're doing right now is just updating our data.”

Hoag said it's not clear how many students actually lack the required vaccinations. She said the district was struggling to make sense of records from other countries, in some cases. In other cases, families handwrote their children's vaccination records, but only official medical records are permissable.

KUOW ends the piece (and thank you to reporter Ann Dornfeld for it):

Those numbers still pale in comparison to the record-keeping backlog in Seattle Schools, which will be especially challenging to tackle after years of cutbacks to the number of school nurses.