I wanted to examine school vaccination rates from just before the pandemic through the most recent data available. I chose September 2019 as the starting point, representing the cohort that began the school year ending with the onset of the pandemic. It is also convenient, since it was the first year of the current vaccine exemption landscape (where there is no personal exemption for MMR). The endpoint is roughly a year ago, corresponding to the 2024–25 kindergarten cohort (the most recent data available).
To keep the comparison consistent, I focused solely on kindergarten rates. Including overall or seventh-grade data would have made the trends harder to interpret.
Here is the source data, available from the state Department of Health.
Here is the data I used for my analysis.
Between 2019 and 2024, there were some notable shifts in compliance across both private and public schools. Private schools, on average, saw a substantial 20% drop in “Out of Compliance” rates, while public schools experienced a more modest 2.3% decrease. This indicates that, overall, fewer parents were not getting vaccination paperwork turned in.
At the same time, private schools experienced an increase in exemptions. The percentage of students listed as “Exempt” rose by 6.8%, including a 2.5% increase in religious exemptions. This change was driven entirely by the Olympia Community School. Their overall exemption rate went up 33%.
Interestingly, Olympia Community is the only non-religious private school in this group. By contrast, St. Michael’s and Evergreen Christian School both saw significant decreases in overall exemptions and religious exemptions since 2019. Evergreen Christian, however, remains second only to Olympia Community in total exemptions. Outside of these, only Boston Harbor and LP Brown reported increases in religious exemptions.
Public schools, meanwhile, showed an overall decline in exemptions. Total “Exempt” status dropped by 4.7%, accompanied by a 2.3% decrease in religious exemptions and a 1.2% decrease in medical exemptions. Lincoln and ORLA, which had the highest exemption rates in 2019, both experienced significant reductions, moving down several ranks over this period.
Looking more closely at exemption types, a few schools saw small increases in medical exemptions, McKenny and McClane, for example, while (again) religious exemptions rose slightly at LP Brown and Boston Harbor.
Overall, these trends suggest that while most schools have become more compliant, a few individual schools, particularly Olympia Community, have driven increases in exemptions, highlighting the ongoing variation across the district.
Several factors may help explain these shifts. The COVID-19 pandemic dramatically changed the conversation around vaccines. Being vaccinated became a social norm in Olympia. Increased awareness of infectious diseases, widespread messaging about vaccine safety, and the public prominence of vaccination as a socially responsible behavior likely contributed to higher compliance. Parents’ personal experiences during the pandemic, seeing the consequences of illness, navigating hybrid schooling, and engaging with public health campaigns, may have reshaped attitudes toward standard childhood immunizations as well.
These changes may also be influencing parental school choices. Religious schools, which historically allowed higher exemption rates, appear to have tightened compliance, reflecting both internal policy decisions and the broader cultural emphasis on vaccination. Meanwhile, parents who remain hesitant about vaccines may be opting for non-religious private schools, like Olympia Community, that more closely reflect their preferences. In this way, the post-pandemic landscape may be producing a subtle form of “sorting,” where schools increasingly reflect the vaccine beliefs of the families who choose them.
Overall, while most schools have become more compliant, the variation across individual schools suggests that parental preferences, school policies, and broader social trends are interacting in complex ways, shaping both vaccination rates and the composition of student populations.
If you are going to single out one school in bold print, it would be prudent to mention the sample size. In 24-25, Olympia Community School had a total of 36 students and 13 kindergarteners, which makes it very different from every single other school on your list (source: I work there). Your readers might have liked to have this information in order to consider how it affects our percentages.
Because I was looking only at the K numbers across the board, most of them had small numbers. I appreciate the added context, but to me, percentages were a fairer way of comparing.