CHILLICOTHE, Ohio — A new public tool launched by the Ohio Department of Health is giving parents across the state an unprecedented look at kindergarten vaccination rates at their child’s school — and the data for two of Ross County’s largest school districts shows a notable gap between them.
Ohio Department of Health Director Bruce Vanderhoff, MD, MBA, announced the launch of the “Annual Ohio Kindergarten Immunization Level Assessment” dashboard, now live on the state’s DataOhio Portal.
“This interactive dashboard gives Ohioans a wealth of important, accessible information,” Dr. Vanderhoff said. “By making this data easier to understand and explore, we hope to support informed decision making that will help protect children and families from vaccine-preventable diseases.”
Ohio law already requires all schools to report summary immunization data to the ODH each year. The new dashboard makes that data publicly searchable by county, by individual school, and by specific vaccine — including MMR, DTaP, Polio, Hepatitis B, and Varicella. Data is available from the 2017-2018 school year through the current 2025-26 school year and will be updated annually.
Using the dashboard, the Guardian pulled figures for the elementary schools in two of Ross County’s largest school districts— Unioto Elementary and Chillicothe Primary School — and the numbers tell two very different stories.
Unioto Elementary, which reported 149 enrolled kindergarteners, posted some of the strongest numbers of the two districts. A total of 96.6% of students had complete vaccine documentation, with no medical exemptions, and only 2.7% claiming non-medical exemptions. Vaccine coverage was consistently high — MMR at 97.3%, DTaP at 97.3%, Polio at 96.6%, Hepatitis B at 97.3%, and Varicella at 96.6%.
Chillicothe Primary School told a different story. Of its 212 reported kindergarteners — the largest cohort of the two schools — only 87.3% had complete documentation. Non-medical exemptions stood at 9.0%, more than three times the rate at Unioto, and 3.8% of students had documentation missing entirely. Vaccine coverage was also lower across the board — MMR at 88.2%, DTaP at 87.7%, Polio at 88.7%, Hepatitis B at 95.8%, and Varicella at 87.7%.
Both schools fall within Ross County’s overall figures, which showed 91.7% of the county’s 815 reported kindergarteners with complete documentation and a non-medical exemption rate of 6.7%. Those county numbers outperform the statewide average, where only 85.4% of Ohio’s 123,786 reported kindergarteners had complete vaccine documentation — with 5.4% claiming non-medical exemptions and 9.0% missing documentation entirely.
State health officials say the dashboard includes data going back to the 2017-2018 school year and is updated annually. It is available to any Ohio resident at the DataOhio Portal.