After two school years of inaccurate vaccination data reporting to state agencies, Zion Elementary School District 6 has managed a remarkable turnaround, but is still fighting vaccine hesitancy among some district parents.
Superintendent Julious Lawson celebrated the campaign the district undertook to overhaul its data collection and monitoring process, which had portrayed the district in a very grim light.
“It was quite the effort on our part,” he said. “It took a team.”
Lawson took over district leadership in July 2024 after a brief shakeup. Keely Roberts stepped down in 2023 after she and her son were injured during the Highland Park July 4 parade mass shooting, and two interim co-superintendents, Lynette Zimmer and Jim McKay, filled the role before Lawson.
But while the shortfalls in reporting have been addressed, concerns still remain with actual vaccination rates for several district schools. Along with its reporting overhaul, the district has been undergoing a joint campaign to inform parents of the importance of vaccinations, Lawson said, and provide more vaccination resources to families.
The online Illinois Department of Public Health School Vaccination Coverage Dashboard, which can show a breakdown of vaccination rates by county and even school district, is built on Illinois State Board of Education data.
The dashboard’s data on the 2023-24 and 2024-25 school years saw incredibly poor vaccination rates for Zion D6, most notably with the measles vaccine, which has been the center of anti-vaccine rhetoric on the national level.
That poor performance was largely due to data collection cutoffs, the district argued last year. The ISBE requires that vaccination data be sent in by mid-November, with immunization collection closing in mid-October. Any students not vaccinated by then are not counted in that year’s data, and updates are not allowed after the window closes.
Lawson previously said that, unlike some school districts, District 6 does not exclude noncompliant students after the October deadline, which lends itself to “parents not moving as urgently as necessary.”
Last year, the school district provided more up-to-date numbers that showed the district was in a far better position than state data showed, although there were still serious concerns with several schools, and the district was overall slightly below herd immunity for measles.
At the time, Lawson pledged to address the reporting shortfalls and get district families connected with vaccination resources.
Since then, the superintendent said the district has worked to overhaul its reporting process, reaching out to schools “quite a bit” to clear up “some miscommunications” about vaccine requirements and compliance rules. It began sending out weekly updates to staff and encouraging principals to have conversations with their school’s families about vaccination. The board was looped in on compliance percentages as well, he said.
Since the undertaking, this year’s state data is largely in line with pre-pandemic numbers for District 6, and it now sits at 95.6% for measles vaccinations.
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Vaccination rates
There are still warning signs to consider, most exemplified by Beulah Park Elementary. Last year, it had an 85.4% vaccination rate for measles, according to the updated data provided by the district.
This year’s official state data shows it crept up to 86.7% in the 2025-26 school year. While this number doesn’t include any students vaccinated after the cutoff date, it’s still far below the 95% herd immunity rate for measles.
Beulah Park sits at the bottom of the district in terms of vaccination rates for numerous vaccines, including measles, chicken pox and polio.
The district has been working to inform parents of the importance of vaccination without excluding students after the cutoff dates, Lawson said, coming from an “angle of support” rather than exclusion.
“How do we best support our families to make sure they get the resources they need to ensure compliance?” he said.
That’s included the district connecting with mobile vaccination services to visit the schools, sharing resources with families such as the Lake County Health Department, and regular messaging to parents about the importance of vaccinations, he said.
“We shared language with them and literature that spoke to vaccines actually saving lives,” Lawson said.
He described one flyer sent to parents about polio, explaining how many have been paralyzed and the hospitalizations children go through because of viruses.
Lawson said district officials have also been fighting vaccine misinformation, including the supposed link between vaccinations and autism, something he had never heard about before. He emphasized there is “no scientific link” between vaccines and autism.
The district is trying to address any concerns parents have to get families “on board,” he said.
“We talked about the safety of vaccines,” Lawson said. “Some of the things that our parents and families had issues with, we try to debunk the myths that prevented folks from wanting to be vaccinated.
Although there’s still room for improvement, the steps made so far speak “volumes to the work that can be done for the school community when we all work together,” he said.
Illinois vaccine data
Overall, Illinois childhood vaccination rates have remained high despite ongoing controversy nationally about vaccines. More than 95% of children statewide received 10 school-required vaccines as of October.
Though pockets of lower vaccination rates remain in parts of Illinois, the statewide numbers were an improvement from the previous school year. Across Illinois, rates for all but one of the vaccines rose slightly.
The state’s goal is for 95% of kids to be vaccinated — a level that’s considered high enough to prevent the spread of infectious diseases and to protect those who cannot be vaccinated.
“Our latest school immunization numbers validate our efforts to make vaccines more accessible,” Gov. JB Pritzker said in a statement. “I’m grateful to the Illinois Department of Public Health, the State Board of Education, school administrators, healthcare professionals, and families for their efforts to keep our state’s youngest residents healthy, informed, and immunized.”
This comes after a year of confusion and doubt in some quarters over the safety and effectiveness of vaccines, and 30-year-high measles numbers across the country.
Last year, U.S. Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. — a longtime vaccine skeptic — fired and replaced all the members of a federal vaccine advisory committee. Federal officials then reduced the number of vaccines recommended for children, no longer broadly recommending flu, rotavirus, hepatitis A, hepatitis B, some forms of meningitis and RSV.
Amid all the back-and-forth, Illinois broke with the federal government, adopting a vaccine schedule developed by the American Academy of Pediatrics that differed from the federal recommendations. Pritzker signed a bill into law last year formally establishing a process for the state to issue its own vaccine guidelines, following concerns about the federal government’s new direction on the issue.
The baiduhai contributed to this report.