Home Visits Deliver Vaccination Message

County Wants Students Back in Class

Kevin Colon, 16, is told what vaccinations he needs to return to school as his brother, Bryan Figuroa, 8, peeks at the school system workers visiting his home. (By Andrea Bruce -- The Washington Post)

"Are you Kevin Colon?" the visitors asked the teenage boy standing at the door.

They spoke almost simultaneously, in English and Spanish. It was 2 in the afternoon, and the boy in baggy jeans and a navy blue Aeropostale T-shirt was waking up from a nap.

Yes, he said, still wiping the sleep from his eyes. And was his mother home? the visitors asked. Yes.

Dory Figueroa, a small, slim woman with red-brown hair tied in a bun, came to the door and invited the strangers into her two-story home on the northwestern edge of Prince George's County.

"The reason we are here today is Kevin was withdrawn from school for not having his immunizations," said Arnold Kaplan, an itinerant pupil personnel worker for the county school system.

Sandra Acevedo relayed the message in Spanish: Maryland has new vaccination requirements for students in grades 6 through 9. Kevin, 16 and a freshman, didn't get the shots, so he was pulled out of school. Acevedo and Kaplan were here to bring him back.

At least 6,000 students in the Maryland suburbs failed to comply with the vaccination requirement when it went into effect in January. Three months later, 808 students still haven't gotten one or more of the shots. Kevin is one of five students at High Point High School who did not have proof of vaccination; none has been in class since the beginning of the year.

This visit to Kevin's house was a last resort. School officials started sending letters to parents about the vaccinations during the summer. The letters were joined by public-service ads on television and the radio giving directions on scheduling appointments at free clinics. Then there were phone calls in English and Spanish.

Kaplan said many of the students in his area without immunizations were Hispanic, and he thought language barriers or immigration status could have played a part in delaying vaccinations.

The campaign to get vaccinations was moderately successful. But there were still a few hundred parents and students the school system could not reach. A few hundred more students were vaccinated and readmitted to school, only to miss getting a required booster shot. Now they are once again out of school.

That left the door-to-door visits, which started last week. They are not an easy solution.

Some of the missing students are chronically truant and unlikely to attend classes with or without the immunizations, school officials said.