California lawmakers are targeting nearly 600 schools that were found to have low vaccination rates for their students, threatening to defund the establishments.
The situation comes after the state audited the schools and found that many failed to reach the student vaccination targets or did not file vaccination reports. On the other hand, critics said that the numbers were misleading and that Big Pharma and political interests drove the audit.
California Threatens To Defund Schools
The California Department of Health (CDPH) made the threat of defunding the schools because the schools reported that more than 10% of their kindergarten or seventh-grade students were not yet fully vaccinated last year or because they had failed to file a vaccination report with the state.
In an email, the CDPH said that schools found to have improperly admitted students who have not met immunization requirements could be subjected to loss of average daily attendance payments for those students, as per the Children's Health Defense.
The department posted the audit list, which noted that 449 schools with kindergarten students, 175 schools with seventh graders, 56 schools with both grades, and 39 schools did not properly file a vaccination report.
Students in the state of California are considered "not fully vaccinated" if they have not yet provided proper immunization records to their school, if they do not have the vaccinations required by the school system, or if they have been admitted to schools conditionally while they are still in the process of finishing their school-mandated vaccine series.
If a student who is behind on the vaccine requirements has not received the first dose of a required vaccine within ten days of starting the school year and a second dose within four months of the first dose, they must be excluded from school.
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Low Vaccination Rates
There are exemptions to the rules, however, that students who are in special education and those with a medical exemption are not required to be vaccinated. Under California law, school staff are required to report vaccination rates of the school to the state each fall and to check up on the ones who are catching up on vaccinations while attending school at least every 30 days, according to EDSource.
The director of the California Immunization Coalition, Catherine Flores Martin, said that after removing the personal belief exemption, they discovered many schools behind on their reporting. They were also allowing a lot of conditional admissions and were not following up on their students.
More than half of Oakland Unified's 48 elementary schools and eight of its schools serving seventh graders were included on the audit list for 2022-23. These include Markham Elementary, where officials found that 65% of the 66 kindergarten students were not fully vaccinated last school year.
The school was found to have the highest percentage of kindergartners in the state's traditional public schools who were not fully vaccinated, with more than 20 students falling under the category, said KALW.
