WASHINGTON – About four hundred students in Prince George’s County will not be allowed to attend school starting Wednesday because they did not get the state-required vaccinations.
The group includes kindergarten students but the majority, 259 seventh- graders, did not get vaccinated, or didn’t provide the paperwork saying they did.
In a statement, the county’s school system says they’ve made “extraordinary efforts” to reach every single student but that now parents need to do their part.
“As of Friday … 155 kindergarten and 259 7th grade students are non- compliant and have received exclusion letters, and beginning Wednesday, November 5, these students will not be allowed to attend school,” the statement says.
Children are required to be vaccinated against measles, mumps, whooping cough and other communicable diseases.
The school system offered free immunization clinics on weeknights and weekends among other steps to help the students meet the vaccination requirement.
“This year was a little different because seventh-graders had new vaccinations they had to take. They had to get a TDAP vaccine and they had to get a meningitis vaccine,” says Dana Tofig, spokesman for Montgomery County schools.
A few weeks ahead of the deadline, Montgomery County schools had thousands of students out of compliance, Tofig says.
“We went on an all out blitz in trying to get parents to understand what the obligations were and getting them to meet those obligations,” he says.
All public school students in both Montgomery and Charles counties are now in compliance with the vaccination requirement. But Charles County schools spokeswoman Katherine O’Malley-Simpson says in August, they noticed they had a number of students not in compliance.
“I think most parents didn’t realize this was a year they had to do it … it’s not a grade where they’re changing from elementary to middle school or just coming into the school system. I just don’t think it was on people’s radar,” O’Malley-Simpson says.
To give students with limited access to health care the opportunity to get vaccinated, both Tofig and O’Malley-Simpson confirm their districts worked with parents to offer options.
Both counties used the following efforts to contact parents:
- offered immunization clinics
- publicized community health clinics
- transported students to clinics
- called students homes
- worked with parents
There are some students in each of Maryland’s districts who will not be vaccinated.
“If there’s a reason that a student shouldn’t have the vaccine, whether it’s a health reason or a religious exemption, there’s certain paperwork they have to file anyway. We just have to know about it,” Tofig says.
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