Public School Parents Largely True Believers in Vaccination

Parents of New York City public schoolchildren appear to be largely immune to fear of vaccines, with only a relatively small number of families religiously objecting to boosting their children's antibodies and T-cells to ward off disease.

Among the more than 1 million students at city schools, there are only 1,733 with religious exemptions to vaccines, according to data obtained by WNYC from the Department of Education, after months of petitioning.

Below, you can use the lookup tool that WNYC's Data News Team created to see where your school stands. If you see nothing about religious exemptions, it means your school either has none or fewer than 10 — the smallest number that the Department of Education would release, to protect families' privacy.

Brooklyn New School tops the religious exemption list — much to the surprise of parent Mina Gurung.

“I do not think of this as a very religious place,” she said. “Maybe some parents are just pretending to be religious.”

During a chickenpox outbreak in November, 25 students stayed home for three weeks. The figure includes children with religious exemptions and others whose immunization for chickenpox (formally called varicella) wasn't complete.

Since then, the number of students with religious exemptions has climbed to 30, accounting for much of the school’s relatively low 93 percent vaccination rate. This, in a system that's 98 percent vaccinated. 

Most other below-average schools don't have significant numbers of parents who withhold their children's vaccines. Their numbers tend to be low because they have partly vaccinated students — students in the process of completing various series of shots that require waiting times.

Most of those schools climb steadily over the course of the year and reach 99 percent coverage in June, according to health officials.

New York does not permit the "personal belief" exemptions available in 20 states. Those waivers have allowed vaccination rates to plummet in parts of California and other regions across the country.

In New York, parents who want religious exemptions must apply with "a written explanation of the foundations for [their] religious belief opposing immunization," according to guidelines from the city's Department of Education. It says applicants are warned that a letter "simply indicating that [they] have such a religious belief, without any further explanation, is inadequate to support the granting of an exemption."

At religious and private schools, processing exemption requests falls to the school principals. But the rejection rate is believed to be quite low. (Health Authorities receive and check approved applications, but not rejected ones.)

In the public school system, local school nurses take exemption applications and pass them to a central office at the Health Department's Bureau of Immunization, where health professionals evaluate them. This year, the Bureau accepted 77 percent of applications, and rejected 23 percent.

In addition to Brooklyn New School, other highly desirable city schools also have relatively high numbers of exemptions, including Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts, New Explorations into Science, Technology and Math (NEST) High School and P.S. 321 elementary school in Park Slope, Brooklyn.