Students who attend religiously affiliated private schools and students in the youngest grade levels in Allegheny County are not getting vaccinated at rates that would provide herd immunity at many of their schools.
About a third of schools in the county have vaccination rates below the county’s 95% target threshold, and about one in four schools has a vaccination rate below 92%, the lower bound that doctors say provides herd immunity for measles.
Some public schools are far below that threshold, but low immunization rates are particularly common at the county’s religiously affiliated private schools. Vaccination rates at parochial schools declined for the seventh year in a row, falling below 90% for the first time, to 89.2%, last year, according to data released by the county last month. The proportion of parents at these schools who claimed a moral or religious exemption from vaccination requirements spiked.
Some of the schools with even lower rates include: Harvest Baptist Academy (62.5%), Holy Family Specialized Learning-Seville (66.6%) and Yeshiva Boys School (74.4%). None of the schools could be reached for comment this week.
Dr. Andrew Nowalk, the clinical director of infectious diseases at UPMC, said schools with very low vaccination rates are the kinds of places where measles outbreaks have been occurring across the country, including in New Mexico, the Carolinas and Texas. In Utah, where religious exemptions are high and only 89% of kindergarteners are vaccinated, a measles outbreak has sickened more than 600 people, including around two dozen babies who were too young to receive their first vaccination.
“When you get down into the 60% range,” Nowalk said, “if a child with measles walked into that school, you’re gonna see secondary cases, almost invariably.”
Allegheny County hasn’t faced a recent measles outbreak. But vaccination rates continued to decline last year in grades K-2, even as the rates have held steady or increased at nearly every other grade level.
These continued “pockets of risk” are why it’s important to prioritize outreach where students are the most vulnerable, according to Jillian Irwin, the medical director for the Allegheny County Health Department.
“We are very concerned about the fact that there are these pockets,” Irwin said. “We’re going to be doing everything we can to shore up those pockets and improve the vaccination rate.”
The department is creating a new countywide strategic immunization plan and has increased its outreach in some public schools. But the county doesn’t yet have any partnerships with the county’s parochial schools – where the biggest declines are concentrated.
Fighting misinformation one family at a time
It’s taking longer than ever to meet with parents who are hesitant to let their children get vaccines, according to Joe Aracri, a pediatrician and the chair of the pediatrics department for the Allegheny Health Network.
In addition to listening to heart beats and taking vital signs, Aracri said he and his colleagues educate parents about the information they are seeing on social media as part of ordinary childhood checkups. Sometimes that means pulling up a specific article on his computer.
“You always have to go back to the original source because a line could be taken out of an article and twisted in a way that’s not necessarily true,” he said.
As a result, the visits are taking twice as long, adding additional strain to the health care system, he said.
Misinformation about vaccines, such as the debunked link to autism, has been around for decades. But since the COVID pandemic, the amount and variety of these challenges has increased, Aracri said. And many of the kids who were born during the pandemic are just now enrolling in school.
“So, with the stances that were around the COVID vaccine, it just created a whole bunch of mistrust and misinformation around vaccination, and we’re starting to see it play out as those kids are starting to enter school,” Aracri said.
Parents now raise questions about the dangers of heavy metals and preservatives in vaccines, and a variety of other theories that have no evidence to support them, he said, other than sometimes a single online post.
“They could say that the MMR vaccine causes you to grow a third eye and people will believe it,” Aracri said. “Our job as pediatricians and as health care providers is to sift through all those concerns and be patient and listen to the concerns and be able to give answers to those concerns.”
At the national level, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of the Department of Health and Human Services, has raised the profile of vaccine skeptics and led an effort to overhaul the country’s vaccine requirements. And as a result 30 states, including Pennsylvania, are no longer following federal guidance for vaccines.
Despite these new challenges, the extra attention from doctors like Aracri may finally be starting to pay dividends in Allegheny County. For the first time since the pandemic, the proportion of students in Allegheny County who are fully vaccinated stopped declining — and even increased slightly, to 93.8%, according to the Health Department’s most recent school immunization report.
The number of exemptions from vaccination for religious or moral reasons rose last year, particularly at parochial schools. (Excerpted from the Allegheny County Health Department’s School Immunization Report 2025-26)
The proportion of students who are fully vaccinated at traditional public schools, charter schools and non-religiously affiliated private schools is similar to the overall county level: 93-94%.
Overall, the success in public schools and in unaffiliated private schools has offset the continued declines in vaccination rates at parochial schools.
Charlene Hartung, of Castle Shannon, sends her children to Hillcrest Christian Academy, a parochial school in Bethel Park, where 86% of students were completely immunized last school year. She vaccinated her three school-aged children because it “gives them the best defense against something that could kill them.”
The decline in vaccination rates at parochial schools worries Hartung. “You could literally have another outbreak like COVID-19, only it could be measles,” she said.
The school could not be reached for comment.
She has seen an increase in vaccine skepticism among parents. “I respect their opinions … they don’t want to expose their kid to something that’s going to harm them,” she said. “But at the same time, if they get that disease, harm is going to happen.”
What county health care workers are doing
To help address this challenge, the Health Department has been holding vaccine clinics at schools that have low vaccination rates. This makes it easier for parents who may have difficulty scheduling an appointment but want their child to be vaccinated, according to Ronnie Das, a department spokesperson.
As part of that effort, the department recently reengaged with Pittsburgh Public Schools. A handful of the district’s schools had some of the lowest vaccination rates in the county, including Arsenal 6-8 (60.0%), South Hills 6-8 (69.2) and Concord K-5 (71.5%). About two-thirds of PPS’ 54 schools had rates above 92%, the lower bound of the immunity threshold for measles.
A spokesperson for the district acknowledged but didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Health Department is increasingly trying to take a more strategic approach to increasing vaccination rates. The department is currently working with the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health to create a strategic plan that will draw on the immunization data in this latest report, Irwin said.
“We really want to be focused on going to where people are in their communities,” Irwin said. “And doing more precision public health, targeting exactly the places where we know we’re vulnerable.”
But the department hasn’t yet partnered with any parochial schools, where the biggest gaps are. “We would be willing to, certainly, if they were to reach out to us and say, ‘Hey, we’ve got some kids … whose parents would like them vaccinated,’” Irwin said.
Similarly, Nowalk, at UMPC, said he didn’t know of any specific programs that had shown success at increasing vaccination rates at parochial schools.
“We really need to work on thinking about strategies to collaborate with our parochial and religious schools and see what we can do to partner with them to try to bring those rates up,” he said.
What if your child attends a school with a low vaccination rate?
Aracri doesn’t think parents at schools with vaccination rates below 92% should be worried but he does want them to know their kids are at more risk.
“I don’t like to fearmonger,” he said. “I just say, ‘Whenever you’re starting to drop below 92%, it just raises concern.’”
Getting the vaccine for your own children, Aracri said, provides significant protection even when the school’s vaccination rates are low — but not complete protection. In the case of a measles outbreak, he said, fully vaccinated children have about a 5% chance of becoming infected. “That 5% chance is real and then when you think about it – it’s one out of 20,” he said.
Parents with immunocompromised children may want to take a school’s vaccination rate into account when choosing schools, he said. “If you have a child that’s, say, undergoing chemotherapy and can’t get vaccines and has a weakened immune system, that’s one of those things that I would keep an eye out as a concern,” he said.
Das, the Health Department’s spokesperson, said that not every parent will have the ability to send their student to a different school. But he thinks parents should be able to use the school-by-school vaccination data published by the county to raise concerns at their parent-teacher organization meetings and to school district leaders.
“I think parents should feel empowered seeing these numbers to be able to discuss this topic to bring up if they all feel comfortable,” he said. “Maybe their own child may not be immunocompromised but someone in the family is.”
The most important advice for parents, Irwin said, is the simplest: “The best way to protect yourself against vaccine-preventable diseases is to get vaccinated,” she said. “So if you’re below herd immunity threshold at your school, the best way to protect your child is to get them vaccinated.”
Lucas Dufalla is the southern communities reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at lucas@publicsource.org.
Oliver Morrison is the health and environment reporter at Pittsburgh’s Public Source and can be reached at oliver@publicsource.org.
This story was fact-checked by Cilia Catello.
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