Looking for vaccination rates at your teen’s high school? Unless you live in this health unit you’re out of luck

As high school students across the province get ready to head back to school this September, many may be wondering whether their classmates have been vaccinated against COVID-19.

But while one health unit gets top marks for transparency on vaccination rates, other parents and teens in the province are in the dark, at least for now.

The province's official back to school plan, released Tuesday, calls for continuing with masks, cohorts and physical distancing measures from last year, with a return to extracurricular activities, field trips and assemblies. But the 29-page plan does not make vaccines mandatory for staff or students, or require public health units to publish school vaccination rates.

Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health is so far the only health unit to publicly post an easily accessible school-by-school breakdown of the proportion of students who've been vaccinated on its website.

Dr. Nicola Mercer, the region's medical officer of health, said they wanted to showcase" how many kids in the community have been vaccinated. The dashboard was launched about two weeks ago, and it's updated weekday mornings.

We thought it was really transparent, to show parents, to show our teens and high school students, that many teens are vaccinated," she said.

That it is now the norm to be vaccinated, that it is safe, that it is effective."

Asked about why public student vaccination rates are not part of the province's back to school plan at a press conference on Tuesday, Ontario's medical officer of health Dr Kieran Moore said they are tracking the proportion of high school students that have had the vaccine at a population level."

The numbers are tracking in a very good direction," he said, at around 73-74 per cent in the province with first doses.

If there was a school outbreak, officials would try to find out the vaccine status of impacted students, to understand their risk, Moore added.

Wellington-Dufferin-Guelph Public Health's early data shows that five large high schools in the southwestern Ontario region have rates of over 80 per cent of students with first doses, and one, Centennial Collegiate Vocational Institute, has just over 70 per cent of students fully vaccinated. Everyone 12 and up is eligible for vaccination.

The average across all secondary schools in the area is 74.6 per cent of students with one dose of a COVID vaccine, and 57.5 with two. The data also reveals some disparity between schools, with the private Emmanuel Christian High School, lagging far behind at just 28.4 per cent of students with one dose, and 13.6 with two.

Mercer believes these rates are going to continue to climb as September nears, and encourages all teens to get the shot, noting that they can go to any vaccine clinic, and don't need to come with their parents.

But she does recognize some challenges, such as access to vaccines for schools in rural communities. They're trying to tackle this by working with schools and offering pop-up clinics.

For some of our schools, it's not always about access, sometimes it's about beliefs," she added.

If they have a belief system that doesn't think that vaccinations are safe or effective, then it takes a little bit longer to convince parents or youth that they should be vaccinated."

Meanwhile in Toronto, parents and students will not have access to a school-by-school breakdown for now, a spokesperson for Toronto Public Health confirmed in an emailed statement.

At this time, TPH is unable to report COVID-19 data on vaccination rates by school because the data that we are able to access are incomplete," the spokesperson wrote. We continue to explore methodologies to obtain this data."

In Peel Region it's a similar story, said spokesperson Trish Kale.

At this time, we do not have this data available as we are still waiting on enrolment information, which should be available by mid-September," she wrote in an email.

Once we receive this, our team will work to provide a vaccine uptake percentage by school in late September."

Mercer said she's not aware of any other health units offering such a breakdown at the moment. But her team has been approached by a few asking how they managed to do it.

They merged two data sets: COVax, the provincial back-end vaccine record system, and Panorama, which is already used by health units to track school rates for other childhood vaccines, such as those for measles, mumps, rubella and polio, she said.

Colin Furness, an epidemiologist and assistant professor at the Dalla Lana School of Public Health at the University of Toronto, said it's troubling" to hear large public health units like Toronto and Peel don't yet have COVID vaccination rates by school.

Yes parents can actually make more informed choices about the risks that they're taking, but public heath units could also be using this data to target interventions," he said, such as pop-up school vaccine clinics.

All of the province's 34 different public health units have the same tools," he said. So if one has a success, the others should follow. It would also be helpful, he added, to know teacher vaccination rates.

If public health units are not looking at vaccination rates for schools than what are they doing for schools?" he asked.

It's as if schools are in a giant blind spot."

May Warren is a Toronto-based breaking news reporter for the Star. Follow her on Twitter: @maywarren11