South Carolina Department of Public Health puts school vaccine forms online

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCSC) - South Carolina parents can go into the 2025-2026 school year with one less thing on their plate thanks to a new online addition by the state health department.

As of Friday morning, parents and legal guardians can now get their child’s official South Carolina Certificate of Immunization, DPH Form 4024, completely online.

This is because the South Carolina Department of Public Health added the form to the Statewide Immunization Online Network, known better as SIMON.

Health department officials say the addition of this form will save families with children from 5K through grade 12 time as they will now be able to access necessary vaccine certification. This access will enable parents and guardians to provide certificates to their child’s school and prove their immunizations are up-to-date.

Before this, families had to either get the certificate from their medical provider or directly from their local public health department.

“This innovation has been a little while in the making, but we’re very excited to announce it now as parents get ready to enroll their children in school for the fall,” the department’s interim director, Dr. Edward Simmer, said. “The convenience that being able to download this official document will provide for parents across South Carolina is tremendous.”

The health department says the SIMON portal is not unlike the online patient health records most hospitals and primary care physicians use to make modern health records easily available to their patients.

The benefits of this, the department says, are that people can verify that school-aged children are caught up on vaccines at home and allows them to provide official records to health care providers or a school with ease.

The department says the system is easy to use and even provided online instructions to help users get the hang of it.

Users will provide the basic information of the person whose record they are obtaining. This includes their first and last name, gender and birth date, as well as the phone number or email address that was entered into the SIMON system by their provider.

The department says that parents of day care-aged children will still need to get the form from their child’s health care provider for the time being because of differing requirements.