Twenty-six years after measles was officially declared eliminated in the United States, it has come roaring back.
Cases and outbreaks have been documented in nearly every state this year, including Massachusetts. As of last week, more than 3,100 cases had been confirmed, according to state-by-state data aggregated by (what’s left of) the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
That’s the highest total in thirty-five years.
Measles is a highly contagious virus, with each case estimated to produce twelve to eighteen additional cases in unvaccinated or under-vaccinated groups. Symptoms can take up to two weeks to appear, beginning with fever, cough, runny nose, and red eyes before the telltale rash arrives.
There is currently no treatment beyond supportive care. Most people recover, but complications can include pneumonia, brain inflammation, immune-system problems, and, rarely, a fatal neurological disease that can emerge years later. Measles can also cause blindness and deafness.
The return of measles is a powerful reminder of the fundamental paradox of vaccine success: By 2000, widespread vaccination had made it difficult for individual cases to spread. That meant families who chose not to vaccinate could, for a time, benefit from the protection created by those who did. But that protection depends on enough people continuing to vaccinate.
Despite declining immunization rates fueled by vaccine skepticism and misinformation—both promoted for many years by the man now serving as the nation’s health secretary, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.—Massachusetts residents remain comparatively well protected. More than ninety-six percent of students entering kindergarten in Massachusetts are immunized against measles, according to 2025–26 school data reported to state health officials, though not all schools submitted data. (Nationwide, last year’s vaccination rate for measles was 92.4 percent.)
But statewide averages can conceal where rates are much lower. That’s why the Massachusetts Department of Public Health asks all public and private schools to submit an annual survey that details their immunization rates. During an outbreak, knowing whether a particular school or community has many unvaccinated children matters more than the statewide number.
For several years, the private Berkshire Waldorf School, the nursery-through-eighth-grade school formerly known as the Great Barrington Rudolf Steiner School, has stood as an outlier when those data are examined.
In September 2023, when the Boston Globe reported on post-pandemic trends in school-vaccination rates, Berkshire Waldorf, which was profiled by the paper, had the highest reported exemption rate in Massachusetts, at 24.3 percent. It was also among the schools with the lowest reported coverage for all required childhood vaccines, including measles. The state currently permits both religious and medical exemptions from school-vaccination requirements.
At the time, the school said the state’s data were inaccurate because Berkshire Waldorf has a mixed-age kindergarten, and some students were too young to have started or completed their vaccinations. A school official told the Globe that corrected information had been sent to the state but declined to provide it to the newspaper.
Last month I asked D.P.H. for that data. According to a department spokesperson, the school never submitted any new figures. Berkshire Waldorf contacted D.P.H. the following year and asked whether it could revise its earlier numbers, the spokesperson said, but the department had already finalized its dataset and said it was too late.
At that point, the school did not send any revised numbers. The spokesperson said that D.P.H. notes on its website that self-reported immunization data from schools “represent a point in time and may contain errors.”
That leaves a curious hole in the record. The original figures remain the only ones D.P.H. ever received. The school said publicly that they were wrong. And the data the school said would show how wrong they were was never provided to the state—despite what the school told the Globe.
The following year, D.P.H. again reported low rates for the Berkshire Waldorf kindergarten: Thirty-four percent for MMR—the vaccine that includes measles immunization—forty-one percent for polio, and just twenty-three percent for the complete series. Nearly fifty-five percent of students fell into what D.P.H. calls a “gap,” with neither a complete vaccination record nor a religious or medical exemption.
A vaccination rate above ninety-five percent is generally considered necessary to maintain so-called herd immunity against measles.
Then, according to published data and the D.P.H. spokesperson, Berkshire Waldorf stopped reporting its immunization information to the state. It is listed on D.P.H.’s website as “not reporting” for 2024–25, and the spokesperson confirmed that the school did not submit an annual survey for the 2025–26 school year, either. (The school also did not submit data for its seventh-grade students, according to D.P.H.’s website.)
In March 2025, the school told the Berkshire Eagle that it had stopped submitting data because its kindergarten had fewer than thirty students—the threshold below which D.P.H. does not publish school-level rates for privacy reasons.
But schools with fewer than thirty qualifying students are still expected to submit their immunization data. Those figures may be withheld from public release, the D.P.H. spokesperson told me, but they “are still used in county and state-level vaccination estimates.”
In late August, I asked the school’s administrator, Joshua Fisher, for Berkshire Waldorf’s current vaccination and exemption rates, whether it shares those rates with current or prospective parents, an explanation of why the school stopped reporting, and the corrected figures it previously said had been submitted to D.P.H. He did not respond to multiple e-mails.
In the September 2024 edition of the school’s “Family Handbook,” the school describes its immunization policy this way: “Berkshire Waldorf School follows the Massachusetts School Immunization Law for grades K-8. This law mandates that all students be immunized before attending school. It also requires that schools submit immunization records to the State of Massachusetts for tracking.” The handbook notes that medical and religious exemptions are allowed by the state and provides a link to D.P.H.’s school requirements.
The latest D.P.H. data for Berkshire County show that low vaccination coverage and high exemption rates are not exclusive to Berkshire Waldorf, though none of the currently published rates are as low as some of the school’s previously reported figures. One example is Muddy Brook Elementary, a public school also in Great Barrington, which reported a ten-percent kindergarten exemption rate for 2025–26—the highest published rate in Berkshire County and tied for eighth highest statewide. Its immunization rates for MMR and the full childhood-vaccination series both dropped that year to ninety percent.
Other local schools, including Undermountain Elementary in Sheffield, reported kindergarten cohorts too small for D.P.H. to publish their rates. Undermountain’s most recent published kindergarten data, from 2023-24, showed a sixty-five percent rate for MMR and a thirty-two-percent rate for the complete required series. Berkshire Country Day School, a private school like Berkshire Waldorf, did not report at all, according to the published D.P.H. data.
There is currently no penalty if a school does not submit its annual D.P.H. survey. But legislation pending on Beacon Hill, including a bill now before the House Ways and Means Committee, would eliminate the religious exemption—as New York State did in 2019 during a large measles outbreak—and also make annual reporting mandatory for all public and private schools.
State Rep. Leigh Davis, whose district includes Berkshire Waldorf, supports both provisions of the proposed House bill. “I think parents should be able to know the vaccination rates at their child’s school, and D.P.H. should have that information as well,” she told me via e-mail. “I understand vaccination can be a very personal issue for families, and I want to be respectful of that. But schools are shared spaces, and these decisions can affect other children, especially those who cannot be vaccinated for medical reasons.”
The bill, H.2554, does not specify a penalty for schools that fail to report. Another bill filed this session and still pending in a state Senate committee would publicly designate nonreporting schools as “elevated risk” and require them to notify families. The same label would apply to reporting schools with vaccination rates below the levels associated with herd immunity.
Davis said she has heard nothing from House leadership suggesting the pending House bill is a priority and described its path to passage during the remaining months of the 2025–26 session as “a pretty difficult one.”
In a press release last week, D.P.H. noted that “Massachusetts is seeing an increase in nonmedical exemptions, a worrisome trend that we are watching closely.” The department went on to describe vaccines as “one of the most powerful public health achievements in history, saving hundreds of millions of lives worldwide.”
(For a thorough report on vaccination rates across all of western Massachusetts, see this story published last year in The Shoestring.)
Olivia Petty
South Main Street’s Pedestrian Problem Is About to Get Harder to Ignore
A notoriously inhospitable and dangerous stretch of South Main Street in Great Barrington—where upgrades to improve pedestrian and traffic safety have been discussed, but not implemented, for almost a decade—is about to become one of the more heavily visited social-service destinations in the area.
Last week, the People’s Pantry closed on a $525,000 purchase of the former Rebelle cannabis dispensary building at 783 South Main Street, giving it a permanent home, more food-storage space, a parking lot, and enough room to handle demand that it says has grown steadily.
Over the last year, the Pantry, which has provided groceries to anyone regardless of income and without qualification since 1999, has served an average of about 260 shoppers a week—enough food for roughly 660 people, according to Board Chair Laura Gratz. It is currently open twice a week for a total of four and a half hours and serves about ten times as many people as when it moved into donated space at Saint James Place nearly a decade ago.
The growth is striking, but not hard to explain. As South County has become an increasingly upscale destination for weekenders and tourists, working families have faced rising housing costs along with higher prices for food, gas, utilities, and other basics. And that need is close to home: Gratz told me recent data show that fifty-five percent of Pantry shoppers live in Great Barrington and ten percent come from Sheffield.
She also said that, with the building purchase now complete, conversations are underway about traffic, parking, and safety. “Crossing [South Main Street] is really, really dangerous,” she said, and the organization is discussing how best to keep shoppers, volunteers, and neighbors safe.
The Pantry’s new building sits directly at the intersection of South Main and Reed Street, at the crosswalk where Gary Fretwell, a seventy-year-old resident of the Brookside Manor senior apartments, was struck and killed just after sunset on January 13.
At the time, a motion sensor that activates the flashing crosswalk beacons was not working. Remarkably, it still isn’t. I tested the system again a few days ago—after documenting the same problem in July—and the west-side sensor still fails to activate the lights when a pedestrian passes under it. The motion sensor on the east side was functioning.
(I’ve written about South Main Street here, here, here, here, and here. Whew! Clearly, someone’s bonnet is full of bees...)
Bill Shein
Meanwhile, five new crosswalk assemblies supplied to Great Barrington by MassDOT—including one for Reed Street with overhead lighting for nighttime crossings—have been sitting uninstalled since April. The town was contractually required to install them within ninety days of receipt or risk forfeiting all $66,250 worth of equipment, which was provided by MassDOT at no cost to the town.
MassDOT spokesperson John Goggin told me last month that the agency was “working with the municipality on a plan for installation” and was “confident that installation will take place.” No date was given.
The failure to repair the old equipment, much less install new assemblies, is increasingly difficult to explain. In July, Town Manager Liz Hartsgrove did not respond to questions about the still-malfunctioning crosswalk lights at the site of a fatal crash and Select Board Chair Steve Bannon declined to comment.
The Pantry’s coming move makes the delays and inaction even harder to ignore.
During distribution hours, the traffic pattern around South Main and Reed Street will change noticeably, with more pedestrians and many more cars turning onto and off Reed Street as shoppers arrive and leave. There is no traffic signal or stop sign at the intersection, and southbound drivers waiting to turn left toward the Pantry’s parking lot will stop just feet before the crosswalk.
That configuration has already proved dangerous. In 2006, a pedestrian was killed there when a driver passed on the right of a car that had stopped to turn left, striking her as she stepped into the crosswalk. The fatality prompted residents to raise private money for the flashing crosswalk lights that remain there today.
The Pantry’s hours matter, too. Its current Tuesday hours run from 4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m., overlapping with evening rush hour and, for about half the year, dusk or darkness.
Gratz told me the Pantry is considering adding days and hours, in part to spread out the flow of shoppers and cars during what are now two relatively condensed distribution windows. “We really need to make sure that it’s safe,” she said. “We’ve really been thinking about it a lot.”
A Railroad Street Postscript
And one more Great Barrington item as I continue to clear the proverbial decks for new reporting projects this fall that are local, regional, national, international, global, and may possibly even reach out into the Milky Way...
A number of readers wrote in to ask about a timeline for the investigation of Railroad Street chemical contamination that I wrote about a few weeks ago.
Based on deadlines set earlier this year by MassDEP, the next major scheduled filing in the investigation is not due until April—unless the environmental testing now underway produces results that trigger earlier reporting or response requirements under state law.
Bill Shein
Meanwhile, if investigators determine that contaminated vapor is entering a building at levels that require additional control, one possible interim measure—beyond the air purifiers already deployed in at least two locations—is a sub-slab depressurization system.
Despite the technical-sounding name, the idea will be familiar to anyone with a radon-remediation system in their home: a fan draws vapor from beneath the building’s concrete slab into pipes that vent it outside, rather than allowing it to migrate through cracks and openings into occupied spaces.
That does not address the contamination itself, but it can temporarily reduce possible health risks as the investigation continues.
Until next time,
Bill
