William S. Hart Union High School District officials are urging the parents of new seventh graders enrolling into the district to have their children receive the Tdap booster shot after a new state Senate bill removed a faith-based exemption clause for vaccinations.

California Gov. Jerry Brown signed SB 227 into law June 2015 to go into effect the beginning of January to end non-medical exemptions from certain infectious diseases for students enrolling in private and public schools in the state.

“The bottom line is, it’s become very black and white, said Dave Caldwell, the district’s public information officer. “If you don’t have that booster shot then you cannot enroll in seventh grade.”

Sixth-grade students enrolling in public and private seventh-grade schools are now required to receive the Tdap vaccine, which is a whooping cough (pertussis) booster shot for ages 11 and up, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website (CDC). The vaccine is also given to pregnant women to prevent newborns from contracting the disease.

The district began communicating with parents of sixth-grade students entering the district to inform them that their student’s immunization records would need to be up-to-date in order to attend seventh grade, according to Caldwell.

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Caldwell also discussed working with other agencies in the Santa Clarita Valley to help folks who need to receive immunizations.

SB 227 is effective for any child enrolled in public or private child care, but students are exempt from the existing immunization requirement if they are enrolled in home-based private schools or in independent study, non-classroom-based programs, according to the law.

In addition, the law states that any pupils who have a letter or affidavit on file prior to Jan. 1 2016 at a private or public educational institution can attend until the pupil enrolls in the next grade span. Grade spans are defined as: birth to preschool, kindergarten to grade six, and grade seven to grade 12.

Results from a 2015-2016 seventh grade immunization assessment conducted by the Immunization Branch of the California Department of Public Health show that of 496,805 seventh graders whose schools reported their status, 97.8 percent were reported to have the Tdap booster.

Those who had a personal beliefs exemption accounted for 1.66 percent of seventh graders.

A total of 5,265 California public and private schools with seventh graders participated in the assessment. Rates of students with the immunization were nearly four percent higher in public schools than private ones.