05-04-2025
Boise day care requires vaccines. Does revived Idaho ‘medical freedom' bill affect that?
Editor's note: This story was updated at 11:19 p.m. April 4 to include comment from the governor's office on how the law could apply to day cares.
For children at Le Soleil French School for Children, a Boise-based day care with four local programs, vaccines are the rule — no exceptions.
'When we first opened, we did accept medical exemptions,' Le Soleil founder and director Justin Snyder told the Idaho Statesman in an interview. 'But we noticed that there are medical providers in Idaho that will sign off on a medical exemption that is not actually needed for a child.
'We were getting some pretty suspect medical exemption papers from folks, and so we decided to just not accept any.'
But Snyder said he's unsure if the private day care will still be allowed to require immunizations now that Idaho Gov. Brad Little has signed a new 'medical freedom' bill that lawmakers sent to his desk on the last day of the session.
The bill appears to bar private businesses like Snyder's from requiring employees, patrons or attendees to have any 'medical intervention' — including a treatment, medication, injection or anything else that can 'alter the health or biological function of a person.'
Just last week, Little vetoed an extremely similar version of the bill that he said would limit families' abilities to keep their children safe and healthy at school. According to a tracking sheet of the governor's daily bill actions, he signed the new legislation 15 minutes after it arrived on his desk Friday afternoon.
Republican legislators asserted that the new bill addresses Little's concerns, with new references to existing school attendance codes and other guidelines. But opponents, like Sen. Todd Achilles, D-Boise, said it was overbroad and would cause confusion for business owners, similar to the uncertainty Snyder is facing.
Sen. Dan Foreman, R-Moscow, introduced the vetoed bill and the alternative, which initially included an exemption that meant day cares, unlike other businesses, could still mandate medical interventions. Lawmakers in the House amended the bill to remove that language Friday.
In debate on the Senate floor Thursday, Foreman told fellow lawmakers that the bill doesn't 'defeat, delete or detract from a parent's ability to opt their kids out of vaccination programs, either in a public school or in a day care facility.'
However, Little spokesperson Emily Callihan told the Idaho Statesman that day cares will still be able to require vaccines under the new law.
Idaho parents have long had the option to waive immunization standards for medical, religious or 'other' reasons. Idaho had more kindergarten students with at least one vaccine exemption than any other state in the country in the 2023-24 school year, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
The distinction was by a wide margin — 14.3% of Idaho's kindergartners had at least one exemption, and the next closest state was Alaska, with 9.5%.
Day cares are considered private businesses under Idaho law, but they still have immunization standards. According to a 2024 Child Care Provider Manual published on Idaho Department of Health and Welfare websites, child care providers are not required by law to accept children who are not immunized.
Snyder said being able to require vaccinations in a day care setting is crucial.
'For us especially, it's important because we have children of many different ages,' Snyder said. 'An infant is not yet able to get certain vaccines, or hasn't yet received all of the doses of a given vaccine. So it's extra important that the older children that are around them — who are probably exposed to more children — are protected, so that they have the sort of herd immunity to keep the younger children safe that haven't yet been fully vaccinated.'
Snyder said many of Le Soleil's families come to the school specifically because they want an environment where their child is around vaccinated children and staff. Snyder and several families whose children come to Le Soleil reached out to the governor to ask him to veto the initial legislation, putting him among the roughly 500 people who contacted Little in opposition, according to Little's spokesperson.
Around 1,500 people encouraged the governor to sign the bill.
Little's veto of the original bill was a relief for Snyder and his families, the day care director said. The governor wrote in the transmittal letter with his veto that the legislation 'jeopardizes the ability of schools to send home sick students with highly contagious conditions.'
Lawmakers edited the bill to include references to existing Idaho code that allows school officials to turn away contagious students.
Snyder isn't sure where his business might stand.
'If a child has pink eye, we don't want every other child and every teacher to also have pink eye, so they go home until they've started treatment and are no longer going to be spreading pink eye,' Snyder said. 'The same thing should be applicable to any nasty, highly contagious disease.
'For a state that talks a lot about being business friendly, I just don't see at all how this would be a business-friendly move when it would make it so hard for us to keep our staff healthy.'
