At Harris Middle School in Yarmouth, parents of 65 percent of the students have given the school permission to inoculate their children. Fifth-graders stroll into the gym and wait their turn. Ten-year-old Gibson Harnett pulls up his left sleeve and looks at the ceiling as Jill Brown, a volunteer nurse and school parent, points the needle at his arm.

"On the count of three -- you have a nice deltoid, so this should be easy -- one, two, three...all done. How was it?" she asks.
"Good." Gibson says.

State health officials in Maine would rather see 100 percent of students inoculated against H1N1, which has been reported in all 16 counties. Four out of the 10 people hospitalized with the virus in the last week were under 18. At least 25 schools all around the state are reporting absentee rates of 15 percent or more.

But officials are pleased that 15,000 out of 190,000-plus school children have been vaccinated against H1N1 since school-based vaccine clinics began last week.

"So the fact that we were able to vaccinate eight percent in the first few days of the school vaccine campaign was astounding," says
Dr. Dora Anne Mills, head of the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention. She says the number would have been even higher if not for delayed shipments of the H1N1 vaccine.

At many schools, 60 to 65 percent of consent forms have been returned, says Mills, who's heard of participation rates as high as 80 percent. "We've had a lot of school nurses report that the consent forms came in at 60, 65, 70 percent, they order some more vaccine, we get it to them, but then parents are showing up with the consent form and saying, 'please,' and they don't want to turn anybody away."

Mills says nationally, polls taken several weeks ago show participation rates hovering around 30 to 40 percent. Some parents say they simply do not want their children to receive vaccines.

"I honestly believe that we need to know what goes in our bodies," says Tabatha Steward of Bethel, a parent and part of the group Unlocking Autism, whose members have expressed concern that certain ingredients in vaccines can cause developmental disorders.

She was among those who tried to get the Legislature to consider a bill that would ban mandatory vaccinations. State officials say vaccinations are already voluntary, but advocates want more explicit language.

"It's a voluntary vaccine -- it's up to the parents to decide whether or not they wanted to have their child vaccinated," says Jeff Bearden, Superintendent of MSAD 35, which encompasses the towns of Eliot and South Berwick. The district expects more than half of its 2,500 students will get vaccinated against H1N1, when all the vaccine arrives.

"Do I wish all of them would have been vaccinated?" Bearden asks rhetorically. "Well, as a parent, I'm going to say yes, but that's an individual choice that parents have and some took us up on the offer and some didn't, for whatever reason."

Back at Yarmouth Middle School, school nurse Judy Berghuis says that she has been happy with how receptive parents have been to vaccinations. "There's been a lot of publicity. Poeple are concerned about their kids getting H1N1 and being in that one percent that don't do well."

She had wondered how parents would react when they heard the shots would contain thimersol. Some autism advocates say the preservative causes the condition, although public health officials say there is no connection. "And we thought maybe parents would back out but they didn't," Berghuis says. "And they stepped up and they said, 'Fine, having it with thimersol is ok.'"

It's not clear how many students need to be vaccinated against the flu to confer protection on the student body as a whole. But a study out of Emory University looking at seasonal flu vaccines suggests that when 50 percent of children get the vaccine, the risk of an epidemic drops by two thirds. When 70 percent are vaccinated, it goes to 4 percent.