by K. Sayford-Wilson

Created on: March 12, 2009

I am the mother of a special needs child. She is highly sensitive to milk products and, while no longer allergic, she attends a special preschool that does bar any nut products from school premises. I agree with this, considering the number of infant through preschool-aged children who attend classes at this school, which also provides an on-site meal program. Eventually she will transition into an integrated school in preparation for regular classroom learning with typical kids, with speech therapy to help her communicate with her teachers and her peers. In food allergies also, I feel that personal responsibility is key, especially as the child gets older. Whether it's for a peanut allergy, shellfish, eggs, milk, wheat, or any of the other main food allergies - when they're little, it's one thing to bar peanuts. As they get older, this becomes unreasonable, and nearly impossible to enforce on a large scale, especially in larger public schools of thousands of students.

I don't believe that this can or should be enforced in middle or high schools. I think that is unreasonable and unnecessary. In preschool and day care centers, it's one matter - children are extremely vulnerable then and are entirely at the mercy of the teachers and caregivers for emergency attention if an anaphylactic reaction occurs. Even my older, typical daughter's school prohibits certain types of foods and beverages simply for health reasons, but they don't offer a school lunch or breakfast program like the preschool program does, where the food and beverages are controlled for health consideration and nutrition.

At the middle and high school level, I think it is unreasonable to expect schools to "police" children's and teenagers' lunches and snacks, or to attempt monitoring of what anyone is eating, nor is it possible to. Many kids go home for lunch, or may go to nearby restaurants for lunch. If someone has a candy bar or cookies that have peanuts in them, an allergic child can sit somewhere else - or can choose to go home for lunch or in another room. If the allergy is that serious, the child or teenager will have been used to living with the allergy at that point and probably accommodations will already have been made. As the parent of a special needs child, I know that eventually you get used to "working around it" - sometimes we need others to work around us, but we also get used to "making do" and don't expect everyone else to accommodate us all the time. Families with peanut allergies, especially a severe allergy, often have Epi-pens on hand at all times, and school districts should have emergency procedures in place if something happens - but someone with a serious health problem should also have an emergency plan in place (including a Medic-alert bracelet or necklace) if something goes wrong and a severe anaphylactic reaction happens in spite of all preventive measures.

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