Follow-up on Vaccination Status

Source

Mrs ERJ, who is an endless font of information, informed me that auditing schools for compliance to waiver/vaccination status would be tedious but not difficult.  Michigan schools are required to keep a "Cumulative Records Folder" on each student and form CA-60(c) is the mandatory Health Insert with Immunization Records (or waivers) .

Side Two of the CA-60(c) form.  Available from this fine merchant

Auditing would be a simple matter of pulling out the student records, one-by-one, opening them up and confirming that:

• They contain a CA-60(c) that matches the student name on the folder
• The CA-60(c) had the immunization fields filled out
• -OR- had a current waiver
• That the immunization fields had not all been pencil whipped (create the appearance of compliance by falsifying the records with the entry of non-data), that is, were not all filled out with the same handwriting/writing utensil. 

After thinking a little bit
It would be more efficient to NOT perform a totally random audit.

If you were designing an experiment you would over-weight the samples that were at the extremes.  That is because you are looking for contrasts.

You would look at Rural (very compliant, very non-compliant), Urban (very complaint, very non-compliant) and Suburban (very complaint, very non-compliant).  Then, as a control you might choose some school buildings that closely matched the Michigan norms for income and diversity.

While you are dipping into the records, you might want to perform some diagonal slices.  Word will get out about the audits and there will be a strong temptation to "fix things". 

One way to look for that would be throw out a wing-net and gather samples of first, second, third and fourth grades while primarily focusing on Kindergarten.  Large discrepancies between K compliance rates and the higher grades imply somebody pencil-whipped the records.