Vaccination exemptions rare, but growing
This time of year, parents are checking the items off their child’s back-to-school list: pencils, pens, scissors, glue, notebooks, backpack.
But there’s another back-to-school-list some parents forget: DTaP, chickenpox, MMR, hepatitis B, polio, and meningococcal — the six vaccinations Ohio law requires students receive before attending school. The DTaP vaccine is given to prevent diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis; MMR is for measles, mumps and rubella.
The first five are mandatory starting in kindergarten. In 2016, Ohio lawmakers added the meningococcal vaccine to the list. One dose is required before a student’s seventh grade year and a second before the student’s 12th grade year.
Last year, 14 percent of Ohio 12th graders had not completed the second dose requirement. With the policy now in its second year, the Ohio Department of Health expects to see that percentage of unvaccinated students go down, spokeswoman Melanie Amato said.
School nurses are typically the ones who track which students in the school are immunized, which are exempt and which need a reminder — or two — to finish their shots, said Debra Stoner, president of Ohio’s Association of School Nurses and a registered school nurse for 21 years.
The diseases these vaccines prevent are all communicable, Stoner said, and lot of times are spread by coughing and sneezing. Unvaccinated students could unknowingly be put at risk for serious illnesses.
“We’re not going to send every kid home who’s coughing and sneezing, or we’d have no kids in school,” she said.
Ohio law allows any student to be exempted from vaccinations if his or her parent writes a statement declining to have the student immunized “for reasons of conscience, including religious convictions …” Students who are advised by a doctor to not be immunized for medical reasons also are exempted.
All Ohio schools, public and private, are required to submit immunization summaries to the Ohio Department of Health for students entering kindergarten, seventh grade and 12th grade. Any students new to their district also are required to do so.
For the 2016-17 school year, less than half a percent of Ohio kindergarteners and seventh-graders were exempted for medical reasons, according to information self-reported by schools to the state health department. Very few — 2.06 percent — were exempted for religious or philosophical reasons, while 7.8 percent had incomplete vaccinations.
Though the number of unvaccinated students is small, the number of parents opting out or choosing to give their child some, but not all, of the required vaccines is growing slightly, said Rebecca Brady, the Ohio immunization representative for the American Academy of Pediatrics.
"There's a lot more of that out there than there used to be," Brady said.
The fact that these vaccinations have been around so long can create a disconnect between parents’ priorities and the real dangers the vaccines protect against, Stoner said.
“We’ve been so good at immunization they’re not thinking about diseases anymore," Stoner said. "They're thinking about side effects."
Columbus Public Health will be hosting immunization clinics every Monday in August at the Columbus City Schools Enrollment Center, at 430 Cleveland Ave., from 9 a.m. to 3 p.m. Patients will be asked for insurance information to cover the vaccinations, but no child will be denied if unable to pay, said Jose Rodriguez, spokesman for Columbus Public Health.
The department’s clinic, located at the Public Health headquarters, 240 Parsons Ave., will offer extended hours from Sept. 9-16. It will be open from 8 a.m. to noon on Saturday and Sunday, from 8 a.m. to 4:15 p.m. on Monday, Thursday and Friday and from 8 a.m. until 6:15 p.m. on Tuesday and Wednesday.
The extended hours are offered for Exclusion Week, which starts Sept. 11 and marks the time when students who are not immunized and do not have an exemption are not allowed in school until they are vaccinated.
This time period is dictated by Ohio law, which does not allow an unvaccinated student without exemptions to attend school any longer than 14 days. Not all schools enforce the rule strictly, though, Stoner said. Many will take that time to strongly encourage parents, but don’t take away classroom time from students.