More than a month after the start of the school year, D.C. is attempting to enforce a long-standing childhood vaccine mandate – but concerns over incomplete and messy data are hindering enforcement and causing local officials to question the policy’s efficacy.

For the first time this school year, D.C. is attempting to enforce a “no shot, no school policy.” While it’s always theoretically been the law that students must be compliant with the city’s routine childhood vaccination mandate in order to attend school, D.C. officials made it a point this year that the policy would actually be enforced, meaning students who were not caught up on routine pediatric vaccinations would be excluded from school.

However, when that first enforcement deadline rolled around on Tuesday, school leaders and D.C. Councilmembers scrutinized the city’s enforcement system, citing problematic reporting databases and poor communication they say ultimately harms already at-risk students and overwhelmed educators.

“We’ve struggled to get accurate data from the Department of Health,” said Barry Brinkley, the chief of staff at D.C. Prep, a public charter school, during a D.C. Council roundtable on the policy on Tuesday afternoon. “Without accurate data… it is very difficult to be strategic in our communications for our families and hold them accountable.”

Originally, the deadline for students to be caught up on both routine childhood vaccines (for disease like measles, mumps, tetanus,and meningitis) and the COVID-19 vaccine was 20 days after the first day of school. In late August, the Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn shifted those deadlines as the city struggled to bring up its low vaccination rates. The purpose of moving the deadline was, leaders said at the time, to give parents more time to vaccinate their children and local education agencies (LEAs) more time to prepare. The deadline for students in pre-K through fifth grade to be caught up on routine vaccinations was pushed from Sept. 7 to Oct. 11. For sixth through twelfth graders, enforcement for routine shots was delayed from Oct. 3 to Nov. 4. Enforcement for the COVID vaccine mandate has been postponed to January, 2023.

Even as the city spent much of the summer pushing families to get their students vaccinated, by the of September more than 23,000 students across the District were listed as non-compliant, according to a spokesperson with the Office of the State Superintendent (OSSE). As schools made final reach-outs in the first weeks of October, OSSE instructed LEAs to offer a two-week grace period for families who did not meet Tuesday’s deadline, so long as they agreed to make an appointment soon, or are waiting for their student’s documentation to reach the school.

According to D.C. Public Schools Chief of School Improvement and Support Bren Elliot, the system sent 3,300 five-day warnings last week. By Tuesday morning, 1,100 elementary school families were not in compliance. Roughly half of those families agreed to make an appointment in the coming weeks, while the other half said their student’s documentation was pending. Only 24 families refused to comply when their student’s school called – a turnaround so dramatic some lawmakers questioned the numbers, given how many students lacked proof of vaccination just a month ago.

“I just need to understand what the number 24 represents,” Ward 4 Councilmember Janeese Lewis George asked DCPS officials in the roundtable. “Because we had over 13,000 kids not in compliance as of September 27, and so are you telling me that 13,000 families have gotten into compliance in the last week and a half?”

Elliot explained that roughly 300 students were absent on Tuesday, and 200 of those families could not be reached, so the number of excluded students may be higher. Officials with D.C.’s public charter school system could not offer numbers of students excluded from school on Tuesday, citing a complex web of immunization tracking systems.

“It is unclear how many students are not up to date on immunizations or have paperwork issues,” said Dr. Michelle Walker Davis, Executive Director of the DC Public Charter School Board. “Many of the other challenges which existed this summer are still present – the three vaccine data systems, Doses 2.0, Salesforce and School Health Management Systems, often report different information.”

Walker-Davis’ concern was echoed by other school leaders who testified before the council on Tuesday, claiming enforcement of the policy has been marred by problematic data systems, and will ultimately leave the most vulnerable students excluded from school during a time when most educators are working to play catch-up after two years of learning loss.

“Many of the students who remain unvaccinated and will be denied access to their classrooms may have been poorly served by institutions during the implementation of this law,” said Aaliyah Hodge, the director of recovery strategy and special projects at KIPP DC. “We’ve dealt with data platform failures, miscommunication between pediatricians and the [Department of Health], overdue vaccinations, and extensive lag time and data entry. The council needs to be aware that some of the students who will be excluded were likely not given the information needed or the access to comply with this law in a timely manner.”

Representatives from other public charter schools expressed similar concerns with the data reporting process, which they say is largely unreliable, creating additional burdens for educators.

“The different numbers require schools to assign additional staff to comb through all the systems to monitor compliance for an accurate picture,” Walker-Davis said. “There are staff members who want to focus on educating students but instead are overwhelmed by vaccine compliance and the desire to make sure every student is in school. No one wants to exclude any students from school, especially if that exclusion is based on a data error.”

Raymond Weeden, the executive director of Thurgood Marshall Academy, a public charter school in Anacostia, said that the vaccine enforcement both takes away from educators’ capacity to focus on students and poses a risk to already vulnerable students if they’re excluded from school. As of Tuesday morning, he says 95 students out of a total student body of 320 were not up-to-date on their vaccines.

“My concern is that the time my team is spending managing the dual role of a school and public health center is taking a toll. When it all comes down to it, the burden of supporting students and their families is on the school,” Weeden said. “We’ll be excluding large numbers of students from Black and brown communities, based on unreliable data.”

Weeden said the same system that flagged 95 out-of-compliance students for routine immunizations also reported that nearly 100% of students had received their required COVID-19 vaccine – a clear discrepancy in the data.

“While I would love to think this is true,” Weeden said, “I know it’s not.”

The bungled and confusing enforcement rollout comes as the city looks towards another deadline in the beginning of 2023 – the COVID-19 vaccine mandate. In 2021, the council passed a bill requiring any student who is eligible for a vaccine that’s been fully approved by the FDA to receive one in order to attend school. Starting in January 2023, all students 12 and over will be required to have two doses of a vaccine, but critics of the bill worry that enforcement will only deepen the educational equity gap between Black and white students; while roughly 92% of white children in the city between the ages of 12-17 have received a vaccine, the rate is about 60% for Black children in that same age range.

During the council roundtable, At-Large Councilmember Christina Henderson asked the representatives from DCPS, OSSE, and the Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn, what lessons they’d learned from the current roll-out, and how they plan to avoid the same issues when the Nov. 4 deadline rolls around for sixth through 12th graders to be up to date on their vaccines. Leaders highlighted individual outreach, like sending letters and calling families on the phone, utilizing patient care technicians (PCTs) in each school to assist administrators with immunization work, and ultimately, being serious about enforcement.

“Doing actual enforcement is an important tool…in other words, I had assumed earlier on, somewhat naively, that we would see our numbers go down much, much further based on the quote unquote, threat of enforcement,” Deputy Mayor for Education Paul Kihn said. “But it turns out that you actually have to be prepared to do the enforcement in order for some families to realize that we are in fact, I would say finally serious and they need to do it.”

The city and DC Health have opened several opportunities for families to get vaccinated in recent weeks, including a partnership with Safeway through Oct. 16, and various Children’s National Hospital clinics throughout the city.

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