Community Immunity Honor Society - Improving Immunization Rates in Schools

About the Program

Category: Civic Education and Public Information (Best in Category)

Year: 2018

Vaccines are one of the most notable public health achievements of the 20th century* To prevent the spread of communicable diseases in schools and to protect California students from disease, California has immunization laws that apply to all schools, public and private, saying which immunizations are required for entry into child care, kindergarten and 7th grade. In late 2014, the Alameda County Public Health Department began a project to look into why, over the previous decade, the up-to-date kindergarten immunization rates in in the county were consistently lower than the California state average rates. Not only did we discover the largest contributing factors to our low immunization rates, we also determined multiple strategies to address them. One highlight was the creation of four different Community Immunity categories (including the Honor Society, Honorable Mention, the Hopefuls and the Non-Immune schools) into which schools were classified based on their immunization coverage rates. Groupings were publicly posted and shared with all school principals, so that schools could see how they compared to their peers. Within just one year, immunization rates improved over 7 percentage points. Alameda County finally surpassed the state average and became one of the best immunized counties in California.