TUSD report: October 18, 2015

Dear supporters and correspondents,

I have a backlog of topics to cover in letters, and a folder of half-written drafts of those letters. I will try to
get them out, one topic at a time. Pressing topics include:
TUSDs budget deficit
School climate and safety and related policies
Payroll and other IT problems
Hiring and teacher compensation and vacancy problems (specific to TUSD, not the statewide issue)
Developments in the desegregation case
Middle school enrollment problem

Proposal to post schools immunization rates

This letter concerns an item on this Tuesdays TUSD board agenda: my proposal, with the support of local
pediatricians, to post on TUSDs website the immunization rates at TUSD elementary schools. The district
already reports these data to the state, as required by law, and it would be easy to post summary statistics in
an easy-to-understand format. The rising incidence of measles and pertussis, which is partly due to falling
immunization rates nationally, make this important information for some families.
The proposal would not affect the process for getting a personal belief exemption from immunization, a
right protected by Arizona law, nor would it disclose individual students immunization status. (Several
federal laws prohibit such disclosure.) It would simply make it easier for families to learn which schools may
be less susceptible to disease outbreaks. This information is unlikely to hurt TUSDs enrollment, because its
schools have generally high rates of immunization.
Dr. Eve Shapiro, a prominent local pediatrician and public health advocate, and I make the case for such
disclosure in an opinion column in this weeks Tucson Weekly. I attached the column to the email. This letter
mostly does not repeat the column but adds detail to some points.
The last page of the letter provides school-by-school kindergarten immunization rates for TUSD, illustrating
the kind of information that I hope to see posted. I have also included district-by-district comparisons of
overall kindergarten immunization rates.
The proposed language (amending TUSD Policy JHCC).
The district shall post on its website a list of all elementary and K-8 schools and the fraction
of kindergarten and (if applicable) 6th-grade students enrolled at the school who have,
according to that schools documentation, all state-mandated immunizations. This list shall
be updated by December 1 of each year.
The proposal refers specifically to kindergarten and sixth grade because those are the data already collected
and reported to the state during each Fall semester.

The proposal returns to the board this Tuesday.

The proposal returns to the board on October 20, but I am not sure about its chances for adoption. In the
Stars article about the proposal, on September 11, Dr. Sanchez and Kristel Foster made skeptical comments
about it, which we address in the oped. I have not however heard anyone state specifically that they would
oppose this policy change.
The states immunization spreadsheets.
After pediatricians spoke in support of the proposal at the boards September 9 meeting, TUSD posted on its
home page a temporary link to a state website that gives access to large and complicated spreadsheets
containing detailed data about individual schools immunization and exemption rates. The spreadsheets do
not, however, calculate schools overall immunization rates, and they appear to contain errors. For example,
the data for some schools, including some TUSD schools, seem to imply that more kindergarten students have
received the complete immunization panel than are immunized for measles alone, which is impossible.
Perhaps I am misreading the spreadsheets, but if someone with a Ph.D. from M.I.T. cannot understand them
after an hour of effort, then it makes sense to provide the information in a way that will be more transparent
to most parents.
Apparent compliance problem.
Arizona law requires that every student who attends a public school be either fully immunized or have a
medical or personal exemption. One interesting implication of the state spreadsheets (if they are correct), is
that 22 TUSD schools are out of compliance with this law, based on kindergarten records alone. After
backward-engineering the data, it appears that each of these schools has between one and five students who
are neither immunized nor exempted. Over the past year the Arizona Republic has reported extensively on
this statewide compliance problem, which extends far beyond TUSD.
It will be interesting to see whether this years compliance data are better, after the Republics reporting on
that issue.
TUSDs kindergarten data are on the last page of this letter.
At the end of this letter, I have calculated, according to my best understanding of the state spreadsheets, the
percentage of kindergarten students who were fully immunized at each TUSD elementary school, at the start
of the 2014-15 school year. (The data for the year 2015-16 are not yet reported.) I have also calculated the
overall kindergarten immunization rate for TUSD and each its major adjoining districts. TUSDs overall rate
of 97.1% is slightly higher than that of most of the other districts, but they all fall within a 4% range. The
largest differences arise between individual schools, not between the district averages.
The district averages are consistent with what appears in national data: lower-income and immigrant
populations tend to have higher immunization rates. Locally, this is true partly because Mexico, like many
countries, has stricter immunization policies than Arizona and allows almost no exemptions. Consequently
children who come from Mexico (regardless of immigration status) are almost always immunized.

Thank you for your interest in TUSD. I hope to send similar (relatively short) letters on other topics, over the
next few weeks. I also hope to send very overdue responses to some of your emails!
- Mark

Overall kindergarten immunization rates, by TUSD school, for school year 2014-15
(There is no magic number, but 95% is widely considered sufficient to protect non-immunized children.)
School

% Fully Immunized

School

% Fully Immunized

Banks

96%

Maldonado

Blenman

96%

Manzo

Bloom

98%

Marshall

100%

Bonillas

100%

Maxwell

98%

Booth Fickett

99%

McCorkle

98%

Borman

99%

Miles

88%

Borton

96%

Miller

98%

Carrillo

100%

Cavett

94%

Myers/Ganoung

Collier

96%

Ochoa

95%

Oyama

Cragin

Mission View

100%
93%

100%
96%
100%
90%

Davidson

100%

Pueblo Gardens

Davis

100%

Roberts-Naylor

Dietz

95%

Robins

100%

Drachman

95%

Robison

96%

Dunham

97%

Rose

Erickson

96%

Roskruge

100%

Ford

96%

Safford

100%

Fruchthendler

96%

Sewell

98%

Gale

97%

Soleng Tom

95%

Grijalva

100%
94%

98%

99%

Steele

93%

Henry

100%

Tolson

94%

Holladay

100%

Tully

95%

Hollinger

100%

Van Buskirk

94%

Howell

100%

Vesey

100%

Hudlow

93%

Warren

100%

Hughes

98%

Wheeler

97%

Johnson

97%

White

Kellond

95%

Whitmore

95%

Lineweaver

98%

Wright

94%

Lynn Urquides

96%

TOTAL

97.1%

100%

Overall kindergarten immunization rates, by district, for the school year 2014-15
Sunnyside

98.2%

Amphitheater

96.6%

Flowing Wells 98.1%

Cat. Foothills

95.7%

TUSD
Vail
Sahuarita

Marana
Tanque Verde

95.4%
94.6%

97.1%
96.9%
96.8%

Note: all calculations are based on

the spreadsheets posted by the Arizona
Dept. of Health Services, which may
contain errors. The accuracy of these
percentages is not guaranteed.