Parents are urged to get children protected before the new school year starts
As parents and caregivers start back-to-school prep, the Wisconsin Department of Health Services (DHS) has released school vaccination data for the 2024-2025 school year, which show 86.4% of students met the minimum immunization requirements, a decrease from the previous school year. Unfamiliarity with a new meningitis vaccination requirement for students in grades 7 to 12 is behind the decrease, it may take some time to increase awareness of the requirement to get all students up to date. When looking at all students’ vaccination data without the new meningococcal requirement, 89.3% of students met the minimum vaccination requirements, a 0.1% increase from the previous school year.
Wisconsin’s data comes at the same time the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) released a national report that shows Wisconsin kindergartners continue to lag behind other states when it comes to being protected against vaccine-preventable illnesses.
“Our school vaccination data tells us there are children in our schools who are not protected from an outbreak of preventable diseases like measles,” said State Health Officer Paula Tran. “In public health, we know that 95% of people in a community need to be vaccinated against measles in order to prevent an outbreak, which is why it’s so important to get children the vaccines they need on time.”
View the entire news release.
