A common argument by schools, mine included, is that they shouldn't have to enact policies for allergic kids because it would give them a false sense of security and prevent them from learning the self-protection skills they would need to live in the real world. As someone who went to a school with such a philosophy, I'm calling bullshit.
My school had no peanut-free table because they didn't want allergic kids to feel different. Which sounds wonderful, until you remember that we are different. There was also nothing available with which I could clean a table, so I was basically spending my lunches playing a low-stakes game of russian roulette and hoping my arms weren't going to break out in a rash. After a few weeks I started carrying wet wipes around and creating my own personal peanut-free zone.
Oh, and the death threat girl I discussed earlier quickly learned that she could evict me from any table I'd chosen simply by sitting down at it and opening a peanut butter cup. She had hours of fun doing this.
So, in my opinion, the lack of a peanut-free table attempted to gloss over my differences and encourage me to pretend to be normal, which is a good way to get myself killed. Probably not a helpful life skill.
My school had no list of alternative candy. Every year I would think, "This is it. We're finally too old to be rewarded with candy." And every year I would be proven wrong. I was a Junior in high school when I walked out, so who knows, maybe in Senior year they no longer throw candy around the room. But I doubt it.
Whenever a teacher pulled out a bag of candy and announced a quiz game I would lean forward to see the label, and about half the time I recognized it as a brand that uses peanuts or is processed on equipment that also handles products containing peanuts, and I had to go sit in the hall for the rest of the class. Which kind of defeats the purpose of school, don't you think?
I know how to walk out of a room, so don't tell me I'm learning any important surviving-the-world techniques, and I'm certainly not learning the subject material. The only thing being banished from quiz games teaches me is which teachers are nice, caring people who truly want all their students to succeed, and which ones are only there for the coffee and the chance to hand out detentions. Probably not a helpful life skill.
My school didn't give a damn what was wrong with you, you were going to eat what you made in home ec!
I had a lot of problems with home ec. Firstly, the teacher was a neat freak who made you Lysol your chair if she caught you sitting on your feet, which I liked to do because I was a small kid and wanted my head on the same level as everyone else's. Secondly, the teacher didn't really see anything wrong with pairing me up with the previously mentioned death threat girl for a module on crotchet, and didn't ask her to stop talking about killing me even though our station was the one closest to her desk. And thirdly, even though I requested I not be given a module for which I would have to cook, she gave me a module for which I would have to cook. And nothing in the fridge had a label.
I actually have no idea why nothing in the fridge had a label. She told me it had to do with the school not being allowed to promote one brand name over another, which seemed like kind of a stupid rule and also meant that there were no ingredients lists. So I told her okay, I'll cook, but I want to wear plastic gloves and I'm not eating any of it.
She nixed the plastic gloves and told me that I was going to be eating all of it.
Everything in that fridge had been opened and who knows who had had their fingers in it, and there weren't any ingredients lists for me to check, and there was a jar of peanut butter staring me down from the top shelf, and she wanted me to cook with this stuff with my bare hands and then eat it. I wondered, did she also want me to call the ambulance myself?
I refused to eat any of it, forcing my disgruntled module partner to deal with the half-rate food we made before the teacher dropped by to do a plate check and make sure every morsel had been consumed. By the end of the week we were halving all the measurements so my partner didn't explode.
Honestly, what was the point of that? It didn't teach me anything, except how to lie to a teacher and get away with it. It actually seems to go beyond refusing to make accommodations and enter the realm of deliberately setting students up to fail, or to get themselves killed.
My school had a zero-tolerance policy with no exceptions. I knew a girl who had asthma, and to use her inhaler she had to ask her teacher for permission to go to the office, and then she had to walk there (because running is strictly prohibited no matter the circumstance), convince the evil gatekeepers (aka the skeptical secretaries) that she needed to see the nurse, and then she got her inhaler. To get a disgusting yet helpful Benadryl tablet I had to do the same, although my teachers rarely let me out of the room and the secretaries liked to spend a few minutes trying to trick me into admitting something before letting me make my request to the nurse. And every time I was in there they would all try to convince me to leave my EpiPens with them for safekeeping instead of, I don't know, carrying them on my person like the emergency lifesaving devices that they were? Because it's so practical to have me walk to the office while I'm going into anaphylactic shock.
The only life-skill this taught me is that I should never freely admit I'm carrying medication, and that I should always keep some disgusting Benadryl tablets in my bag and should take on in a bathroom stall when I think I need it.
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