Parkland Close to Vaccination Compliance

After months of effort to make sure all its students have their vaccinations, Parkland School District had only about a dozen left who need shots.   

The Pennsylvania Department of Health is requiring all school districts to show that students have received vaccines to protect against diseases such as mumps, polio, meningitis, whooping cough and chicken pox. This year, the state added a requirement for a second dose of chicken pox vaccine so school districts have been scrambling to bring their student populations under compliance. 

The effort started last year and the state deadline was May 21. Parkland nurses and administrators sent letters, e-mails and made phone calls to families whose children were not up to date on their vaccines.  

Rob Thornburg, Parkland’s director of student services, said as of this morning there were only a dozen students out of more than 9,000 in the district who had not complied. 

Parents of students are allowed to apply for an exemption from the vaccinations for their children on moral or religious grounds. If parents seek an exemption on medical grounds, they have to provide a written statement from a doctor stating the vaccines would be detrimental to the child's health. 

Thornburg said there were less than a dozen students who were excluded from attending school. “The parents have been contacted to make sure they’re taking steps or else [their children] were excluded from school,” Thornburg said.

Most of Parkland’s 11 schools have students in full compliance; the holdouts are largely at the high school, he said.

Some parents had to be asked to put their moral or religious objections in writing and other parents were just ignoring the information, Thornburg said.