After elementary and secondary schools saw a huge spike in students behind on mandatory vaccinations last year, the numbers are finally lowering back down to pre-pandemic levels.
“Last school year was a really big catch-up year for us because we came out of a pandemic and people weren’t able to get vaccinated,” Dr. Nicola Mercer said during Wednesday’s board of health meeting.
Under the Immunization of School Pupils Act, or ISPA, students must have a record of immunization for nine designated diseases like polio and measles or a valid exemption to attend school in Ontario. Without either of those options, they may be suspended for 20 school days.
This was the first year public health assessed records and enforced ISPA legislation since the pandemic.
In the 2023/2024 school year, many students were suspended in the process, with records either not reported to public health or not up to date, said Karen Mulvey, manager of vaccine preventable diseases at WDGPH.
“This was a large undertaking,” she said. “We had over 12,000 students that were not up to date.”
This was addressed over a six month period with over 17,000 staff hours for entering records, assessing records, talking to parents and schools, and providing vaccine clinics.
Prior to the pandemic, the number of enforced suspensions and missing vaccines had been going down for both elementary and secondary students since 2016/2017.
“The numbers continued to go down, then the pandemic happened,” she said.
Last year there were more than 8,000 elementary students and 4,136 secondary students not up to date on their vaccinations, compared to 2,735 and 2,684 in 2018/2019, respectively.
Currently, there are only around 2,900 secondary students without up-to-date vaccine records – a significant change from last year and nearing pre-pandemic levels.
The number of elementary student vaccinations is not yet available, though Mulvey assured they’re expecting it to be “quite a bit lower, and will continue to go down.”
