What I'd like to know is why schools and classrooms are party venues
at all.I thought schools were for, you know--
education.And the "fun" argument? Yeah-- I get how veggies don't say "fun party." MY question is-- why does
school need to say it??
Now put yourself in the shoes of a child that I personally know-- a HG child-- who sat in a room full of other children eating glorious bakery cupcakes... and looked at--
a whole, fresh vegetable brought in for show-and-tell, which the teacher "kindly" offered instead. Nice that he "didn't mind" enough to "ruin it" for anyone else, though, I suppose.
Honestly-- that one is a slap in the face to anyone like me whose kid will NEVER-- NEVER-- get to "enjoy" the "party" like your kids. Schools are bound by federal law to be inclusive. They are
choosing to allow crap into classrooms for non-educational purposes, and then they turn parents like me into the bad guys for wanting it to STOP.
Crazy world.
As for "knowing" what they can and cannot eat-- PLEASE re-read my posts. My daughter knew that as well. She's just not lucky enough for that to be sufficient, given that as little as a few milligrams of an allergen can send her into anaphylaxis-- and has. Being
around unsafe food IS, in and of itself, very dangerous for her. The single most irritating and ignorant question of all time has to be; "why don't you teach her what she can't eat, then?" A close second is the incredibly foolish assertion that she could eat whatever she liked if we got her one of "those pen things."
News flash: some kids are just plain more TRUSTING than others-- and not even PG kids have the
judgment of adults when they are 2 or 3 years old. Believe me, we know how dangerous their assumptions can be at that age, smart as they are. My daughter has also
carried her own autoinjectors (Yes, plural, and always a mix of lot numbers) since she was
two years old. She wears them EVERYWHERE, and they hang in the same location in our home.
So while I'm glad that cupcakes really "make the day" for some kids-- I'll be honest here and suggest, with all due respect, that maybe they belong somewhere other than classrooms that have food-allergic children in them. I think that the statistics there are pretty compelling in suggesting that most preK through 3 classrooms DO have at least one child like that in them. While far fewer than 5% of those children is like
my daughter, some of them are-- and the larger issue is why on earth it would ever be okay to exclude ONE child systematically like that all year long, even if it didn't make that child feel inherently
unsafe in the process.
School attendance is compulsory-- as in the case that Elizabeth posted, and schools can use this to leverage parents to accept risks for their children
in our absence that we would find UNTHINKABLE if our kids were in OUR care instead. That, deep down, was the breaking point for me with schools, public or private. They wanted ME to be okay with THEM taking risks with my child's safety that I found horrifying-- which led me to believe that fundamentally, they were too stupid to take good care of her, or they wouldn't be willing to do them, either.
