Homeschooling Trends Before and After the New York State Repeal of Nonmedical Vaccination Exemptions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Importance Evaluation of New York State (NYS) Senate Bill 2994A repealing school-entry nonmedical vaccine exemption options suggests that the law was effective to increase school vaccine coverage; however, the law’s impact on homeschooling has not been examined. Objective To evaluate the impact of NYS Senate Bill 2994A on homeschooling prevalence. Design, Setting, and Participants In this population-based cohort study with interrupted time-series analyses, we estimated changes in homeschooling prevalence following NYS Senate Bill 2994A implementation. The study cohort comprised school districts that submitted annual student enrollment and homeschooling reports for all school years during the study period, 2014-15 through 2019-20. Analyses were conducted in January 2025. Exposure NYS Senate Bill 2994A went into effect in June 2019. Because legislative compliance was not evaluated for most students until the following school year, we considered the 2019-20 school year as the law’s effective date. Main Outcomes and Measures We calculated homeschooling prevalence as the number of homeschooling students divided by the total number of students, multiplied by 100. We estimated homeschooling prevalence differences (PD) comparing the time periods before (referent) and after NYS Senate Bill 2994A. Crude and adjusted PDs accounting for longitudinal homeschooling trends were estimated at the population-level, district-level, and county-level. Due to data limitations, PDs for New York City (NYC) were estimated only at the population-level. Results Among 685 (99.3%) NYS school districts, the repeal of nonmedical vaccine exemptions was associated with an overall increase in homeschooling prevalence of 0.1% (95% CI: 0.1%-0.1%) among NYC students and 0.3% (95% CI: 0.2%-0.3%) among students outside of NYC, after adjustment for longitudinal trends. At the district-level, the law was associated with an average 0.4% (95% CI: 0.3%-0.5%) increase in homeschooling prevalence among non-NYC schools. Spatial variation in crude homeschooling PDs was observed in county-level estimates (range: -0.3% to 1.5%; interquartile range: 0.2% to 0.5%). Conclusion and Relevance We found evidence that NYS Senate Bill 2994A was associated with small, but significant increases in homeschooling prevalence. These results suggest that a small number of un(der)vaccinated students may have disenrolled from traditional “brick-and-mortar” schools to avoid compliance with the law.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".