<p>What it means is that contagious diseases are more likely to spread in private schools as they find unvaccinated students. So while a rational parent will want to ensure full vaccination of his/her child against deadly vaccine-preventable diseases, s/he will want to be even more vigilant about keeping vaccinations up to date if the child attends a private school. In addition, if the child is medically unable to receive some of the vaccines, the parent may want to consider the vaccination rate of students at any schools under consideration.</p>
<p>As the parent of 2 kids who attend/have attended 4 different private schools I find this interesting. I know all the schools my kids have attended require records documenting state mandated vaccines every year. I personally do not know of any parents who have requested exemption, of course it isn’t a big source of conversation either.</p>
<p>Given the school they highlight in the first paragraph, I wonder if it’s not so much that most private schools have a lower rate than public schools, but that certain private schools have very high opt-out rates, and they drag the rate down when all private schools are considered together.</p>
<p>If you have 10 private schools all about the same size, with 10% opt out rate at all but 2, and those 2 have an 80% opt-out, you end up with an average opt-out rate of 24%. If just one has that 80% rate, you still have a 17% opt-out rate among that group of schools!</p>
<p>If a school has an 80% opt-out rate, I suspect it is part of the school culture, not something those who don’t opt-out don’t know about (in fact, those who didn’t opt out may just have younger children who started in public schools and did meet the requirements before transferring to private school). The administrators at those private schools probably take no issue with this, because it is what the parents (their customers) want. If a public school had that high of an opt-out rate, I suspect someone would be investigating to find out why. I also suspect parents who are likely to opt-out for personal reasons are also more likely to send their kids to a school with that kind of culture, if they can.</p>
<p>Parents care about their kids, and they choose to show it in different ways. Those who immunize wish to avoid these diseases. Those who opt-out question the need, and wish to avoid potential side-effects. Perhaps a more helpful question would be what vaccines they are opting out of. I thought about opting out of the chicken pox vaccine for my kids, because I don’t trust that it will be a life-long immunization, but decided against it, because it is no longer common enough that I could find someone to expose them at an early age.</p>
<p>Around here its the families that send their kids to “Christian” schools that don’t vaccinate. The Catholic schools and public schools are on par with each other for vaccination rates. The homeschooled kids have very, very low vaccination rates. There are just not enough people the remember the devastation these diseases can do.</p>