There were enough unvaccinated students at about 5% of California’s public schools to fuel outbreaks of preventable childhood diseases last year, according to audit data from the state — and another 1% of schools failed to report the data entirely.
More than 500 schools had 10% or more of their students on “conditional admission” or overdue for required shots, according to California Department of Public Health data. Some students had medical exemptions while others were not quite done with multiple-shot series, dipping their schools to the 90%-or-lower fully vaccinated level.
The magic number public health officials want to see here is 95% fully vaccinated — a level where “herd immunity” is reached, which prevents disease from spreading.
“It’s not like the SWAT team is going to bust down your door if you’re not fully vaccinated — that’s probably why we’re seeing what we’re seeing,” said Andrew Noymer, epidemiologist and demographer at UC Irvine. “It’s on the schools to enforce or report, and they’re obviously dragging their feet.”
COVID shots — as well as flu —are not required for public school attendance. The must-do list targets contagious illnesses such as diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis; polio; Hepatitis B; measles, mumps and rubella; and varicella (chickenpox). Many of those require a series of shots, timed for maximum effect, over weeks or months.
These tallies of schools, where 10% or more of incoming kindergarteners and seventh graders were not fully vaccinated, were reported to the Department of Public Health for last school year:
• Three elementary schools in Orange County: Fletcher Mandarin Language & Gate Academy and Palmyra Gate Magnet in Orange Unified, as well as Lowell Elementary in Santa Ana Unified. There were no middle schools.
• Riverside County had four elementary schools on the list: Cabazon Elementary in Banning Unified, 21st Century Learning Institute in Beaumont Unified, Sycamore Academy Of Science And Cultural Arts in Lake Elsinore Unified, and Longfellow Elementary in Riverside Unified. There were also three middle schools.
• San Bernardino County had 38 elementary schools on the list, including six at San Bernardino City Unified and six at Snowline Joint Unified; as well as 12 middle schools.
• Los Angeles County districts had 95 elementary schools on the list, including 62 in Los Angeles Unified. Long Beach Unified had Garfield Elementary and Stevenson Elementary on the list, while Pasadena had Webster Elementary. Another 19 middle schools in L.A. County were on the list, including 11 in L.A. Unified and two in Pasadena.
See the CDPH’s full list of schools here: Kindergarten schools with 10% or more not fully vaccinated; and Middle schools with 10% or more not fully vaccinated.
Districts on the list weren’t keen on chatting. But some kudos to Long Beach Unified, which said it provides resources to families about the vaccinations required for school attendance “and ensures that all required notifications related to infectious diseases are provided to families. In accordance with state law, some children may receive vaccine exemptions for medical reasons.”
So?
Schools reported this particular 10%+ slice of data to the state in addition to reporting more detailed, school-by-school vaccination data, which will be released in the not-so-distant future.
The year-to-year comparison of 10%+ data is mixed: More schools failed to report in 2023-24 than the year before, but fewer schools had 10% or more not fully vaccinated.
Why is this important?
“When you have hundreds of kids together on a daily basis, they are sure to share germs,” says a primer from Stanford Medicine.
“The occasional cold may not be a huge deal; however, there are many contagious illnesses that pose a significant health risk if not prevented. Outbreaks not only pose a threat to the children, families, and teachers, but also can lead to school closures and disruption of academic activities.”
The 95% threshold is important because, at that level, transmission fizzles so we can all get on with our lives and educate America’s youth, Noymer said. The exact threshold varies from disease to disease and the law doesn’t always recognize those subtleties — but it doesn’t really need to.
“Measles is highly contagious so you need a high threshold — but the measles vaccine is quite possibly the best we have, bar none,” Noymer said. “Mumps is less transmissible so it would have a lower threshold, in theory — but the mumps vaccine is a bit less protective on average.”
So having a higher threshold sort of evens things out.
Cold shoulder
Vaccine skepticism is nothing new — it was around long before Robert Kennedy Jr. decided to run for president. It has, however, grown in the pandemic’s wake.
The World Health Organization found that childhood immunization coverage stalled in 2023, leaving 2.7 million additional children un- and under-vaccinated compared to pre-pandemic levels in 2019. Immunization coverage has still not returned to 2019 levels, which reflects “ongoing challenges with disruptions in healthcare services, logistical challenges, vaccine hesitancy and inequities in access to services,” WHO said.
In the U.S. in 2012, 96% of kids were vaccinated for diphtheria-tetanus-pertussis, according to WHO’s data. Last year, that had dropped to 94%.
Public health officials are partly to blame for overselling things like the flu and COVID shots, which don’t seem to do much to tamp down transmission, though they do appear to curb the severity of disease, Noymer said.
“At one point in time, it was uncontroversial that kids get their shots before going to school,” he said. “The anti-vax movement, writ large, is really something that I regret. Questioning science doesn’t bother me — science isn’t some stuffed shirt that cannot withstand questioning. It’s ignoring science and making stuff up that bothers me.”
Suellen Hopfer, associate professor of pediatrics and of health, society and behavior at UC Irvine, encourages parents to get the facts and get their children vaccinated — “it benefits the children, who get less illness and miss less school, and eases impacts on the family all around,” she said.
Kids should be well-rested to minimize side effects, and parents might want to negotiate the fear-of-needles issue (overcome in my experience with bribes of ice cream for compliant behavior). The risk of disease is oft much greater than the threat of a needle, she said.
We’ve asked school districts and state officials for more detail — like when and how they check less-than-fully-vaccinated kids’ progress, what if any sanctions there are for noncompliance, how many, if any, kids are barred from attending because they’re behind on shots. We’ll let you know what we find when the next batch of detailed data drops.
