When a measles outbreak hit West Texas earlier this year, school absences surged to levels far beyond the number of children who likely became sick, according to a study, as students were excluded or kept home by their families to minimize the spread of the disease.
Absences in Seminole Independent School District, a school system that served students at the heart of the outbreak, climbed 41% across all grade levels compared with the same period the two previous years, according to the Stanford University study.
The preliminary study, which has not been published or undergone a formal peer review, offers a glimpse at the toll on student learning from the spread of measles, a highly contagious disease that has crept up in communities around the U.S. with low vaccination rates. In Texas and nationally, about two-thirds of measles cases have been among unvaccinated children. When measles is spreading, public health officials respond by excluding unvaccinated students from schools.
“The costs of that absenteeism are just not among the sick kids, but all the kids who are kept out of school as a precaution,” said Thomas Dee, a Stanford economist and education professor who co-authored the study.
Measles is airborne and poses severe risk for young children. In 2000, the illness was declared eradicated in the U.S., thanks to the widespread usage of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine. In recent years, more parents have sought exemptions to school requirements for the shots, and most states are below the 95% kindergarten vaccination rate that experts say is needed to prevent outbreaks.
In Seminole Independent School District, only 77% of kindergartners were vaccinated against measles in the 2024-2025 school year, according to state health department data. The measles upsurge there launched the United States’ worst measles year in more than three decades, sickening 762 people across Texas in seven months.
That number could have been even higher, as the Texas Department of State Health Services says there were an additional 182 potential measles cases reported in March 2025 among children in surrounding Gaines County that the state excluded from its count due to lack of information.
The study estimated based on state data that 141 Seminole district students had confirmed measles cases. It found the increase in school absences was approximately 10 times what would be expected from just those students.
State health officials recommend that people sick with measles or suspected measles isolate at home until four days after they get the telltale rash. State guidance calls for unvaccinated or otherwise vulnerable students to be excluded from school for up to 21 days after exposure to measles.
Children from preschool to first grade had the most pronounced spike in absences — a 71% increase from the last two school years, according to the study.
Most student absences amid the outbreak were due to local health requirements for children to stay out of school if they may have been exposed to somebody diagnosed with measles, Seminole Superintendent Glen Teal said in a statement.
Beyond the students who were directed to stay home, it's unclear how many families may have kept children out of school on their own as a precaution. But there's a good argument that parental concern played a role, said Jacob Kirksey, a Texas Tech University education policy professor who was not involved in the study but reviewed it.
“If you're hearing on the news or you're seeing that there is just an illness outbreak more broadly, the parents are going to be predispositioned to just be more hesitant to send their kids to school,” he said.
Outbreaks in other states, such as South Carolina, also have produced spikes in school absenteeism.
More than 165 people — including 127 students from three schools — were in a 21-day quarantine as of Tuesday because they were unvaccinated or otherwise vulnerable to getting sick. Some children have been quarantined twice due to new cases, said Dr. Linda Bell, state epidemiologist for the South Carolina Department of Public Health.
“Vaccination continues to be the best way to prevent the disruption that measles is causing to people’s education, to employment and other factors of people’s lives in our communities,” Bell said.
Missing out on learning time can have long-term implications for a child's success. Schools have been dealing with learning loss from the COVID-19 pandemic, which contributed also to elevated rates of chronic absenteeism.
More frequent absenteeism also puts a strain on teachers' ability to educate their students. Most educators aren't trained on how to handle instructional pacing when a large chunk of their students are absent, Kirksey said.
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FILE - A vial of the measles, mumps and rubella vaccine is on display at the Lubbock Health Department, Feb. 26, 2025, in Lubbock, Texas. (AP Photo/Mary Conlon, File)
NEW YORK (AP) — Christine Baranski was in the playground outside St. Matthew’s Church in Bedford, New York, about three years ago when she came across Matthew Guard, artistic director of the Grammy-nominated Skylark Vocal Ensemble.
“I love choral music,” she told him.
An Emmy- and Tony-Award winning actor, Baranski went on to attend some of his concerts.
“I was a fangirl basically,” she recalled. “And I think we just said, `Wouldn’t it be fun to do something together?’”
Baranski agreed to narrate a music-and-spoken word version of Charles Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol” last December at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York, which owns the original manuscript of the 1843 classic. A recording was made last June at the Church of the Redeemer in Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, and released Dec. 4 on the LSO Live label.
She will perform it again with the group on Thursday night at the Morgan, which is displaying the manuscript through Jan. 11, and again the following night at The Breakers in Newport, Rhode Island, where she will again portray the acerbic Agnes van Rhijn when Season 4 of HBO’s “The Gilded Age” starts filming season four on Feb. 23.
“I have this thing about keeping language alive, keeping beautiful, well-written language,” she said. “Dickens, Stoppard, Shakespeare. We’re getting awfully lazy in our use of the English language.”
She compliments Julian Fellowes, creator of “The Gilded Age” and “Downton Abbey,” for distinguished prose.
“I think he’d play Agnes if he could,” she said. “He gives her the witty stuff.”
Baranski leaned on the skills that earned her an Emmy for “Cybill” and Tonys for “The Real Thing” and “Rumors.”
“You get to bring to life a lot of different characters, none the least of which is Ebenezer,” she said at the library this month. “It’s wonderful for an actor to differentiate in as subtle a way as possible these different characters. As an acting piece, it’s wonderful. And not many women have done it. It’s been done by Alistair Cooke and Patrick Stewart and Patrick Page and all these great actors — but I get to do it with a chorus.”
Guard weaves in underscoring by composer Benedict Sheehan with Baranski’s words and 10 carols that include “Silent Night” and “Deck the Halls” plus “Auld Lang Syne.”
Reciting the entire story would have created a Wagnerian-length evening.
“This manuscript itself is about 30,000 words and we needed about 5,000 to make it a concert length,” Guard said. “I tried to create space in the narrative for obvious musical exclamation points or emotional feelings, almost like arias in an opera.”
Sheehan had worked together with Guard on a 2020 recording “Once Upon a Time” that weaved together the Brothers Grimm’s “Snow White and the Seven Dwarves” and Hans Christian Andersen’s “The Little Mermaid.”
“I said why don’t you commission me to write choral underscoring for the narrative that can kind of stitch together these different choral pieces?” Sheehan said.
Baranski got narration experience in 2023 when she replaced Liev Schreiber with the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra at Carnegie Hall for Beethoven’s “Egmont.”
“I could do this the rest of my career,” she thought at the time. “Just put me in a concert hall surrounded by great musicians.”
After working with dialect coach Howard Samuelsohn, Baranski practiced on Zoom to hone a 19th-century voice and avoid cliché.
“I said this is a good warm up for Aunt Agnes because it’s that kind of speech we were taught at Juilliard,” the 73-year-old Baranski said, recalling lessons from Edith Skinner decades ago.
“Sometimes it’s just a question of modulating your voice, just different rhythms and staccato or legato,” she said. “I want the voice of the Ghost of Christmas past to be disembodied… ethereal.”
She didn’t have an urge to join in on the carols.
“We take from each other,” she said. “When the chorus first heard my version of it, I think it subtly influenced the feeling of it and I take from the mood of the carol and bring it into my interpretation.”
“It’s a really exciting back-and-forth actually,” Guard said. “It’s not really totally clear who’s driving the bus at times.”
Baranski hopes the project has a future.
“We want to film this someday in the Morgan,” she said. “Make this a yearly event at the Morgan, because here’s the manuscript and people. It’s just one of those things like Handel’s `Messiah’ or `The Nutcracker.’”
She’s going to gift the CD to her grandchildren, four boys ranging from ages 2 to 12. Among her previous holiday experiences was portraying Martha May Whovier in the 2000 movie “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas.”
“They’re curiously not interested in my even being Martha May in `The Grinch,’” Baranski explained. “Their friends sometimes say: `That’s your grandmother.’ But I just want to be their grandma — do you know what I mean — and not somebody?”
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
Skylark Artistic Director Matthew Guard and Christine Baranski are interviewed beside "A Christmas Carol In Prose; Being a Ghost Story of Christmas" by Charles Dickens, Dec. 1843," at The Morgan Library & Museum, in New York, Monday, Dec. 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Richard Drew)
