Nut free classrooms. Guaranteed?
The other day I was preparing lunch for my two year old, non-allergic son for pre-school and grabbed his favorite type of yogurt… YoCrunch, the kind where a small container of M&M’s are placed on top of the container of “low” fat yogurt (another brilliant idea cooked up by the food conglomerates. Next it’ll be rainbow sprinkles to pour on top of their turkey sandwiches. And yes I am sometimes guilty of taking the easy route and offering my child mediocre but much beloved snacks.)
I was about to place the yogurt into my son’s lunch bag when it dawned on me that the M&M’s were actually not M&M’s but Reese’s Pieces which my mom must have bought. My retired mother helps out with my youngest one in the afternoons and even does some supermarket shopping for me which is a lifesaver with me working full time now. Just to be clear – my food allergic child Ben is NOT allergic to peanuts, but rather has a nut allergy. He can eat peanuts all day long, so it wasn’t a major error or perhaps not an error at all. It’s just that my son’s pre-school, like many others, did send out a request in the beginning of the year asking parents to refrain from sending any nut products to the classroom because of kids with food allergies. It suddenly dawned on me how easy it would be for any mom to innocently pack and send off this same popular yogurt snack with their child to their “nut-free” classroom without realizing what she was doing. After all, the average mom without kids with food allergies doesn’t live her life with the same crazy but necessary habit of studying food ingredients and labels. It would have been just as easy for a teacher to not notice that this snack contained PEANUTS, the biggest allergen offender out there, and even easier for a child to share his “M&M’s” with another….
All of this has made me think a little different about an experience I had in the past. The AllerMates team attended a School Nurse association event in San Francisco and I had the opportunity to talk to hundreds, if not thousands of school nurses. I was utterly shocked (and somewhat offended) to hear many school nurses from districts all over the country tell us that they did not believe in “nut-free” classrooms to protect kids with a nut allergy. I didn’t realize how sheltered I had been up until then. I live in an area where “nut-free” zones are the norm. From my kids pre-schools to their elementary schools, it’s all I’ve ever known and I assumed that the rest of the country was the same.
So hearing from some, school nurses no less, that protecting kids with a nut allergy in nut-free zones was impossible to guarantee as well as impractical as they didn’t help prepare children to the realties of the real world which was full of allergens – left me speechless. Yes allergy free zones are not a part of the real world but is school supposed to accurately represent the real world to its young students? The real world is also full of crime and drugs and we certainly don’t expose our young children to these harsh realities at school. Bottom line is that school of all places should offer a safe haven for children…and this means ALL children, kids with food allergies included.
What I have come to realize and to even concede with as far as some of those school nurses is… that there are NO guarantees. Any institution that offers an allergy free zone can’t wholeheartedly guarantee it. After all they are dependent on the parents of the other children in the classroom to comply and unfortunately errors can occur. As far as giving parents a false sense of security I know that it’s impossible to control and guarantee almost anything in life these days but I sure do sleep better at night knowing that my son’s school is trying. I always tell parents it’s best to use an allergy bracelet to alert caretakers at school, camp or elsewhere of kids’ health concerns. Even in classrooms that aren’t considered nut-free, at least teachers will immediately be notified of your kiddo’s allergy!
xo
Iris