Colorado could finally be shedding its reputation as a state that eschews childhood vaccinations.

New figures from the health department show, for the second school year in a row, that more than 90 percent of students got their required shots.

The shots are being administered at levels that officials say is needed to protect children against diseases such as diphtheria, tetanus, hepatitis B and polio. Prevention of the spread of viruses also is protecting kids who don’t get vaccinated.

“This builds up protections for all kids — even those who can’t, for some reason, get immunized,” Tony Cappello, director of the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment’s disease control and environmental epidemiology division.

Based on information reported by schools and child care facilities across the state, nearly 93 percent of students at Colorado schools and more than 95 percent of children in child care or preschool received their immunizations during the 2017-18 school year. Immunization and exemption rates for individual vaccines were stable compared with the previous year, health officials said.

Immunization rates were 93 percent or better for all vaccines, except for Tdap, which was 90 percent for those in sixth grade or up. Tdap is a combination vaccine that protects against tetanus, diphtheria and pertussis, commonly known as whooping cough.

The latest vaccination numbers are a far cry from just a few years ago, when Colorado was considered a pivot point in the anti-vaccination movement. In 2013, Colorado ranked 45th among states in vaccination rates for children ages 19-35 months and ranked at the bottom nationally for kindergartners vaccinated for measles, at just 82 percent. Colorado was also one of 20 states that allow parents to claim any kind of personal opposition to immunization programs.

The state’s low vaccination rates worried doctors who said they were well below the 92 to 95 percent levels required to protect the population against an outbreak of measles-mumps-rubella or other diseases.

But stiffened requirements for opting out of vaccinations and more awareness of the need for vaccinations are helping Colorado boost its immunization rates, officials say.

“I think we are on target, but there is still a lot of work to be done,” Cappello said.

The number of Colorado schools and child care facilities reporting their immunization and exemption rates to the state this year rose six percent over 2016-17. Nearly 90 percent of Colorado schools and child care facilities that were required to report did so in 2017-18.

In all, the department collected immunization and exemption data from 1,860 K-12 schools, representing more than 880,000 students, and from 1,728 preschools and child care facilities, representing 106,500 children.

This is the second year the state health department has collected such data as required by the Colorado Board of Health. The information is placed on a website that enables parents and guardians to look up immunization and exemption rates for their schools.

“We’ve improved the system to make it easier for schools to report and parents to use these data,” said Paul Gillenwater, data manager for the immunization branch for the state health department. “Users can search for and sort data according to their needs, and quickly compare schools and child care facilities.”

This year, the state did not provide a statewide exemption rate, saying a building-by-building exemption rate was a more accurate indicator of how many students were opting out of vaccines. Last year, 2.6 percent of students’ parents or guardians had claimed an exemption from vaccinations, the large majority of those falling under the “personal exemption” heading.

A 2014 state law required schools to reveal immunization and exemption rates upon request. And in 2015, the board of health toughened the rules for nonmedical exemptions, which include personal belief and religious exemptions, requiring parents to submit exemption forms every year instead of just once during their child’s schooling.

The 2017-18 data showed that Denver Public Schools, the state’s largest school district, had an exemption rate of less than 1 percent for most shots. The rural school districts of Moffat and Hinsdale County have the highest exemption rates in the state, with 16 percent in Hinsdale and 33 percent in Moffat.

Boulder Valley continued to be an outlier for being one of the Front Range districts with the lowest immunization rates. For 2017-18, Boulder Valley posted exemption rates of 4 to 6 percent depending on the shot.

State health officials say it is currently not possible to accurately compare Colorado’s immunization and exemption rates with those of other states because school-immunization requirements differ and states collect data in different ways. But in 2015, Colorado ranked 14th among U.S. states from childhood immunization, with more than 24 percent of children underimmunized at 36 months of age and 472 Colorado children hospitalized with vaccine-preventable diseases, according to Colorado Children’s Immunization Coalition and Children’s Hospital Colorado.