Photo by Paul De Bruin

Beginning this school year, the state of Maryland implemented new guidelines for immunizations.  Students in grades 6-9 are now required to have 3 Hepatitis shots and documentation of Varicella.  In addition students are required to be immunized against chicken pox or provide a doctor’s note verifying the month and year they contracted chicken pox if they have already had it.

Since March parents have been receiving letters and calls to notify them of the immunization requirements. Students were supposed to be immunized before the start of this semester, but the deadline has been extended to August 23rd, then September, and now January 2.

At a School Improvement Team Meeting this week at Spring Ridge Middle School one of the topics causing a stir was the number of students still not vaccinated. “The assistant principal said over 100 students at Spring Ridge alone still needed their vaccinations,” one concerned parent told The Bay Net after the meeting. The school nurse, however, denied the number was as high as 100. Although some parents left the School Improvement Team Meeting under the impression that students might be turned awayor locked out on Monday, Patricia Wince Supervisor of Health Services for St. Mary’s County Public Schools told The Bay Net the students will have until the start of the spring semester before they’ll be excluded if they haven’t had the State mandated immunizations.

“We’ve been working on this since March,” Wince told The Bay Net. “We’ve made our second or third contact with parents and are continuing to send out written letters,” Wince said Friday. In addition, the schools have been educating local doctors about the new regulations. “We had a dinner for all the local physicians to let them know they’d be seeing an influx of students,” explained Wince. “We’re catching parents as often as we can, when they visit the school, or if they come to see the nurse for other reasons,” said Wince.

According to Wince there are costs associated with the new vaccinations, but they should be covered by private insurances. Families without insurance can contact the school for assistance and to be put in contact with physicians.

Despite the schools’ efforts to ensure students meet the requirements, Wince estimates some 700 children in St. Mary’s County are still not in compliance. If the parents of those students do not have their children vaccinated and produce the certifications before January they will be required to be excluded from school. Since this is a State regulation, St. Mary’s County is not the only school system dealing with the situation of potentially excluded students. If St. Mary’s is representative, there could be over 2,000 students in Southern Maryland who won’t be allowed to return in January unless parents take action in the next four weeks. And this would have consequences for the schools as well as the students. School attendance is part of the statistics tracked under the No Child Left Behind Act, and multiple absences due to immunization problems could trigger remediation under that program.

Wince says the school board is preliminarily discussing the possibility of offering vaccinations at the schools in the future. However, those are preliminary discussions with the health department and nothing has been finalized, stressed Wince.

–>