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Head of ʻIolani School on Requiring COVID-19 Vaccinations for Students

Iolani School
ʻIolani School students in spring 2020.

ʻIolani School was the first private K-12 campus to announce it will require COVID-19 vaccinations for vaccine-eligible students in grades seven through 12, and all employees.

The Conversation talked to head of school Tim Cottrell about that decision as Hawaiʻi sees a wave of triple-digit COVID-19 cases for multiple days in a row.

"(Last year) we were probably one of the more rigorous places where we asked students to wear a mask and a face shield all the time, except when they were eating," Cottrell said.

ʻIolani School
Tim Cottrell, Head of School

He said all of ʻIolani's safety measures worked well and there were zero on-campus transmission cases last year — students were on campus for the majority of the year.

"It's the same perspective moving into this year: how can we do it as safely as possible with the change being that vaccination and testing are really good tools in our toolkit?" he told Hawaiʻi Public Radio.

Cottrell said families who did not wish to vaccinate their children only needed to provide some type of justification, such as a letter from a pediatrician for a medical exemption.

"But it's really easy to get an exemption. Out of the 1,400 or so families in our upper school, I think we have between 40 and 45 that have requested exemptions for either medical or religious reasons," he said. "So if one out of 15 people, or one out of 20 people is not vaccinated, that's a totally safe community because the virus just doesn't have places to hop and propagate."

ʻIolani School employees have a vaccination rate above 99% and the upper school will come in above 95% vaccinated, Cottrell reported.

When vaccines are offered for younger students, Cottrell said, "We expect a large majority of our families to have their kids vaccinated, but we don't intend to mandate it for the lower school."

ʻIolani is one of two schools in Hawaiʻi mandating vaccines for staff and students. The other is Brigham Young University in Lāʻie.

This segment aired on The Conversation on July 26, 2021.

Catherine Cruz is the host of The Conversation. Originally from Guam, she spent more than 30 years at KITV, covering beats from government to education. Contact her at ccruz@hawaiipublicradio.org.
Sophia McCullough is a digital news producer. Contact her at news@hawaiipublicradio.org.
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