Originally Posted by Mk13
All the special ed director has always told me is "don't worry, we deal with allergies all the time ... blah blah blah". But never any specifics outside of what we have going on in pre-school.

We got this response too, but then it turned out that they had never really had a kid with life-threatening food allergies and had never been asked to do the things we asked them to do to keep our kid safe. I agree with polarbear in that you will encounter adults at the school who get food allergies, and those who think we're overreacting. We lucked out with having a school nurse who had herself had an anaphylactic reaction, so she was happy to write up a good safety plan, but that doesn't stop incidents such as the teacher thinking it's OK to have exceptions so we don't make a particular kid feel bad, for example.

And be prepared for the teachers to forget. I found that it was good to regularly bring in treats as a sneaky reminder that my kiddo can only eat approved foods. (Hi Mrs. Teacher, here are graham crackers that are safe for DS. I've marked them with a sharpie. Feel free to share them with the class too.)

It begins again with every new teacher, so it's extremely important to make sure your kiddo gets on board and knows all his allergens to the best of his ability. This helped when my kiddo started with a new teacher, who asked a question on the first day of school when my son was 6. DS answered correctly, so the teacher offered him a piece of chocolate. Since DS knew he was allergic to dairy and nuts, he was able to tell the teacher no, I'm allergic to that. I had spoken to the teacher 2 days earlier about DS's food allergies, but it hadn't sunk in yet. The teacher felt horrible and apologized and I brought in a giant bag of substitute safe treats for awards.

I think it's a good idea to try to contact the GT coordinator now, asking for advice. She may have good ideas, if only providing some differentiation instruction to the teacher. Good to get her advice on a teacher too, if the principal will go along with that.