Dear Honorable West Virginia Legislators,

We are your fellow West Virginia parents, grandparents, caregivers, neighbors, and community members. As vaccine-preventable diseases continue to reemerge across the country, we are concerned for the health and safety of our kids and communities.

We ask that you do not change what currently exists in state code for child care and school entry immunization requirements in West Virginia. 

We are coming together to encourage you to maintain the state code so that West Virginia can continue leading the nation in protecting kids and communities from deadly yet preventable diseases. Weakening our state’s child care and school immunization requirements (for example, removing vaccines from the policy or allowing nonmedical exemptions) will put our children, and subsequently our communities, at greater risk of preventable diseases like measles, polio, and whooping cough (pertussis).

In schools and child care facilities, children spend the majority of their day in close contact playing, eating, and learning side by side – sometimes upward of 8-10 hours a day or more. This close contact is a central way germs spread. Maintaining high immunization rates helps disrupt that spread. The immunization requirements in our state code are an essential way that we keep our immunization rates high in our schools and communities.

Maintaining high immunization rates protects our kids and it also safeguards others. This is important because lower rates of immunization have effects that ripple beyond daycare and school walls to negatively impact our elderly, our teachers, pregnant women, our healthcare workers, and our hospitals. Those who are too young to be vaccinated or who have certain medical conditions that make them more vulnerable to disease are also impacted. 

There are specific immunization rates we need to achieve as a community to help keep everyone safe. For instance, it takes about 95% of people in a group to help keep measles from spreading. When we fall short of these targets, we risk outbreaks that affect us all, like the ongoing measles outbreak in South Carolina that has caused hundreds of children to be out of school and daycare for weeks.

When child care and school immunization policies are weakened (such as by adding nonmedical exemptions or removing immunization requirements), the effects extend far beyond schools and kids. Outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases can impact our state in a number of ways, including jobs, businesses, and the local economy. Businesses already weigh the health of our workforce very heavily when considering whether to locate in our state. Our people need to be at work, and businesses need their employees to stay afloat – that is all at risk when employees are out sick or caring for sick kids, or dealing with school or child care center closures due to an outbreak of a preventable disease.

In short, preventable diseases harm children and strain our schools, communities, and state.

We're proud of our state's strong record when it comes to childhood immunizations, especially in the face of recent outbreaks in neighboring states and across the nation. Our state’s child care and school immunization requirements have demonstrated their effectiveness. As of December 2025, all five states surrounding West Virginia had measles outbreaks in the past year, yet West Virginia did not have a single case. This was a credit to our longstanding state code – and, to all of the legislators who voted in 2025 and prior legislative sessions to maintain that state code, which unequivocally protects our kids and communities.

We sincerely thank all of the legislators who have actively protected our children and communities from vaccine-preventable diseases by maintaining our child care and school immunization requirements in state code. We invite all lawmakers to join in that commitment. In doing so, you're contributing to a legacy of showing dedication to keeping our kids, families, businesses, economy, and generations of West Virginians strong and resilient.

We West Virginians look out for one another, especially our children, and our existing state code reflects that. At its core, this is about protecting children and ensuring West Virginia remains a place where people can live, learn, work, and raise healthy families.

For the above reasons and many more, we ask that you do not change our state code’s child care and school immunization requirements. 

Thank you for your service,

Your Community Members