Fort Worth falls way short on kids getting measles vaccine. Schools want to change that.

Routine vaccination rates for Fort Worth kindergartners have dropped to worrisome lows in the last school year, with just 86% of youngsters having received the vaccines that protects against measles, mumps and rubella.

Fort Worth school district officials say they are stepping up outreach, enlisting campus nurses and principals to remind families that kids need to be up to date on their shots or else submit proof of medical or conscientious exemption to the vaccine.

Families who have not submitted the needed paperwork will get reminders and calls to let them know about the state’s immunization requirements, said Justin Gaddis, who leads the school district’s work on health and well-being.

The district also is posting messages on platforms like Facebook and NextDoor.

“We always hovered around 95% or so compliance, and then last year, we dropped pretty considerably,” Gaddis said.

Families have until Sept. 30 to submit proof of vaccination or proof of exemption to their child’s campus. If they haven’t submitted the required paperwork by then, the district will start calling families to make sure all kids are accounted for.

A combination of factors contributed to the dip in vaccination rates, said Gaddis and Shannon Cooper, the district’s executive director of health services.

A return to fully in-person learning in fall 2021 meant all students had to be in the classroom last year. Children and adults alike missed out on preventive care during the pandemic. Plus, sources of routine vaccinations for Fort Worth kids weren’t available before and during the 2021-22 school year.

In summer 2021, immunization providers including Tarrant County Public Health and the Immunization Collaboration of Tarrant County were solely focused on distributing the COVID-19 vaccine. Several school-based health centers on Fort Worth campuses closed.

Together, these factors left children with less access to routine care.

The drop in childhood vaccinations occurred around the world over the course of the pandemic, as the SARS-CoV-2 virus closed health clinics or prevented families from seeking care. The combined effect of stay-at-home orders early in the pandemic and repeated inundations of patients sick with COVID-19 forced many medical providers to focus only on patients who were urgently sick.

The American Academy of Pediatrics said the pandemic-related decline in child immunizations caused historic lows in the 2021-22 school year.

Statewide, 94% of Texas kindergartners had received the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine last year, according to data from the Department of State Health Services, putting Fort Worth below the state’s average.

In the last school year, there were almost 580 Fort Worth kindergartners — about 11% of the district’s total — who were marked “delinquent” in receiving the vaccine that protects against measles, according to data provided to the Star-Telegram.

That means that these students had not received the needed vaccines or had not submitted the necessary paperwork to claim an exemption. Children who are unvaccinated against measles are at particularly high risk, because measles is one of the most contagious viruses in human history. The disease can cause pneumonia and serious illness, and in rare cases can cause swelling of the brain that can lead to permanent damage or event death. The disease was declared eliminated in the U.S. in 2000, but has emerged again in the last decade because of a growing anti-science movement that has promoted false information about the safety of childhood vaccines.

Texas law requires all children to receive vaccines that protect against nearly a dozen diseases, unless they have a medical or conscientious exemption to receiving the shot.

The COVID-19 vaccine is not required to attend school in Texas, although public health leaders have urged families to vaccinate their children against the disease.

The vaccine that protects against the human papillomavirus, or HPV, is also not required to attend schools in Texas, but is similarly recommended by pediatricians as a vital protection against the virus, which most people are exposed to at some point in their lives. The virus can cause cancer in some cases.

For students who don’t have health insurance or families who don’t have a primary care doctor, Gaddis recommended reaching out to children’s school nurses or to the district’s health services department. Tarrant County Public Health is also a resource, he said.