Jill Tucker reports at The San Francisco Chronicle:
While a new state law requires children to be vaccinated to attend public or private school, thousands of California students are filing into classrooms this month without the required immunizations.
In fact, it will be years before the law that Gov. Jerry Brown signed last year, in the aftermath of a measles outbreak that was traced to Disneyland, fully takes effect and forces all kids — save those with strict medical exemptions — to have all their shots.
What’s changed is that parents can no longer opt out of vaccinations by claiming a religious or personal-belief exemption. However, parents need to provide immunization records at only two points of their child’s school career — at the outset of kindergarten and seventh grade.
As a result, those who had already claimed an exemption are grandfathered in until they move from preschool to kindergarten or from sixth to seventh grade. First-graders won’t have to show proof of immunizations for six years, and eighth-graders can graduate from high school without ever having to get the 10 shots preventing diseases like measles and hepatitis.
