Posted on 09/25/2007 7:15:42 AM PDT by Cagey
ST. JOHNS COUNTY, Fla. -- Some young St. Johns County students are no longer allowed to bring a popular lunchtime food to school. Peanut butter has been banned.
A kindergarten student at Ocean Palms Elementary in Ponte Vedra has a peanut allergy that has forced the student's classroom to become a peanut-free zone, WJXT-TV reported.
Not all parents are happy with the changes in other students' diets and the inconvenience caused by the peanut ban.
Tracey Torres's son is 5 years old. She said one of his favorite lunchtime sandwiches is peanut butter and jelly, which is also one of Torres's favorites because it's quick, easy and nutritious.
"That's just a typical thing that a kid brings to school and it's something my son likes. It's quick and easy for me in the morning. To not be able to bring that and have to do something else is a burden on me in the morning," Torres said.
She said the peanut-free classroom has been a burden on her in the morning since his kindergarten class at Ocean Palms went peanut free because another student is allergic to peanuts.
When the peanut allergy issue first came up, school officials tried to separate kids with nuts from kids without by sitting them at a different table in school but the close scrutiny was too much work.
"Too much work … and the students weren't always able to eat lunch," said Ocean Palms Elementary Michael Parrish.
Under the new peanut ban, students area able to eat lunch but just not peanuts.
Torres said she thinks it's unfair for kids to suffer because of one student's allergy.
"The burden should be placed back on the parent of that child, and their only responsibility should be to create an awareness with the other parents and children," Torres said.
However, Parrish said awareness isn't enough when dealing with a life-threatening allergy.
The principal said the school is working on a more permanent solution. He said they would probably end up with a peanut-free table in the cafeteria and another table that allows peanuts.
If a child is so allergic to peanuts that he may die from talking to someone who has recently eaten peanut butter (not saying this is the case here, but it is the case for some children), then they should not be out in public at all.
An allergy of that type of severity can only be controlled by control of your environment, not by your own behavior.
For example, let’s say little Billy is allergic to peanuts to the point that inhaling a minute amount of peanut dust will cause him to have a severe reaction. Little Timmy sits next to him in class. The night before, little Timmy went to a baseball game and got a new hat and a bag of peanuts. Little Timmy wears the new hat to school the next day, and it has peanut dust on it. Little Billy asks to try on the hat and gets peanut dust on himself.
Now, no matter that peanut butter is banned from school due to little Billy’s allergy, he has still come in contact with the deadly allergen.
That is why bans on one source of contamination are counter-productive. It creates a false sense of security.
My kids were in elementary school 15 years ago. You would have thought I would have been informed by the school if it were an issue. They took P/J almost everyday for lunch.
>I don’t know the situation with this particular child, and I am aware that some parents tend to overreact. However, the woman who is whining about having to make her son something other than a peanut butter sandwich,<
If you send Junior to school with a chicken or turkey sandwich, because of the PB&J ban, and he gets Salmonella (and ends up in the emergency room), what then?
Peanut butter is generally safe for a packed lunch because it is resistant to bacteria, unlike meats and mayonnaise.
It makes far more sense to isolate a highly allergic child than it does to panic an entire school.
And his parents should be relieved of the burden of paying school taxes, right?
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And I also since I send my kids to private school. Yeah right... Good try. Don’t like the menu? Go to a different restaurant. Don’t change the menu.
I'm allergic enough to avocados to be down for two days with very little ingestion, people used to slip 'em into my salads trying to "prove" it was all in my mind.
I know people so allergic to licorice that they literally leap away from anyone with twizzles in their hand.
Bananas shortened my mother's life when her kidneys wound down.
They tell me that artificial sweetener is bad for you and lots of people are terrified of preservatives in anything...I'm guessing that Tab and white bread are still allowed at school.
Fact is that peanut butter has been around since humans decided they didn't have to eat roots right out of the ground lest the hyenas take it away from them. It's an inexpensive, healthy, enjoyable, noon time meal for 99.999% of humans.
When one member of the larger group has a condition that requires group change - that change should apply to the one and not to the many.
(Ask anyone who still smokes how 'accomodating' society has been.)
Otherwise, good luck in outlawing avocados and bananas, and I'll smuggle my licorice in from mexico if necessary.
I have no idea what you are talking about. If you are trying to say that the smell or even slight contact with peanuts cannot cause a severe or fatal reaction, you need to do some research.
I’m really not sure what you’re trying to say.
I suspect it is lawyers and litigation. Peanut allergy is certainly not new. When I was in elementary school there were two kids with PA. Their parents taught them how to cope in a world full of peanuts, and for the most part it worked.
I became aware of it when one kid had a reaction to some home-made cookies (no label, naturally). He survived, but got pretty dramatically ill very very quickly.
The concept of taking care of yourself went out the window when lawyers learned that they can have a heated pool and two Mercedes if they sued school districts.
In the past, when PA people took care of themselves, you never knew because it was never in the news. Now, it makes the news because making a room or school or county peanut-free inconveniences a lot of people who otherwise never need to think about peanuts.
www.peanutallergy.com
www.foodallergy.org
are good sources of info. The message board at peanutallergy is an interesting mix of ban-peanut-from-the-world-for-my-kid and “does anyone know of a good peanut-free cookie?” or “how safe is Wendy’s”.
No family like that, but a few years ago some biddy raises hell at me on a plane flight about the peanuts I’m eating. Seems she was allergic to them. I told her she was not eating them, I was. If the smell sets off your allergies, then get off the plane and go home, ‘cuz I’m certainly not going to give up eating them. Especially after demanding I throw them away.
I took a mouthful, munching happily, and started breathing out a zone of peanut breath plasma around my seat. She survived.
probably too much germ free cleanliness as a little kid. That causes the immune system to go crazy, causing all kinds of allergies
Parents don't want to be bothered. They'd rather unleash their Peanut Peter on the daytime babysitting service.
HAhahahaha! Now that is the truth!
HAhahahaha! Now that is the truth!
It’s not that the school doesn’t want certain students singled out. It’s that the school’s lawyers don’t want to be sued if one of these students come into contact with a peanut. I’ve heard teachers say the reason all peanuts have to be banned is because the allergic kids will try to swap sandwiches with those who do have pbj.
People with allergies do sometimes seek out the foods they’re allergic too. I remember one girl I dated back in the 70s. Took her out to dinner where she ordered lobster. A few hours later I had to take her to the emergency room. That’s when I found out she was shellfish allergic. I asked why she ordered it when she knew she waa allergic and she said she just loved the taste. That was our last date.
The adjuvent (used to heighten allergic response) used in most vaccines is derived from peanut oil. So basically your child’s course of vaccines also makes them allergic to peanuts.
When did kids begin to be allergic to peanut butter? Apparently there is some kind of pandemic peanut butter allergy going around. And it has condemned us to pretzels on airplanes. Yet when I was a child in elementary school and high school, I don’t remember ANYONE ever being allergic to peanut butter. Does anyone know of any studies showing what has caused this?”””.....
Good question. Along with Asthma and Autism. I was raised in rural Wisconsin, and I don’t remember anyone with Asthma- child or adult.
Now they claim that One in every 150 children has Autism. I don’t wish to castigate the problems for parents, but where is this coming from? Former drug use by parents who won’t admit to it? A change in the processing of peanuts into peanut butter? Some sort of combination of the peanuts and the margarine used by the parents? God forbid they use real butter like we did!!!
I am tired of the mainstreaming aspect of the austic child being put into the classroom where all it does is disrupt the learning process of the other 149 kids of the group who do not have autism. Where is the fairness in that and what kind of education is your normal child getting which will prepare them for a decent job or college? The school boards love the inclusion of the “learning problems” children. In this area, a regular child gets a budget of about $7000/year, and the “learning problem kids” get a budget of about $25,000 per pupil per year. Doesn’t take a genius to see why the school boards want these kids “included”. It bloats their income and in the long run, it stunts the learning of ALL the kids, IMO.
When we were kids, it took a whole loaf of Wonder bread with peanut butter and jelly to make sandwiches for the 4 of us kids. I don’t know of much else we had for our school lunches. We not only all survived, all 4 of us were self- employed, 3 with employees. I stayed alone doing bookkeping. I can remember the largest jars of peanut butter and strawberry jam on the kitchen counter. Those were the days of the waxed paper sandwich bags. Brown paper bags. Apples, etc. Bought a half-pint of milk from the dispensor in the school for a nickle. No cafeteria.....But we all got an excellent education.
The craziest part is that the little dairy town I grew up in and went to school in was named the best place in USA to live and work this past August by Money Magazine. Middleton, Wisconsin. Blew me away. Town has grown and gotten waaaayyy too yuppified for my tastes, but I couldn’t call it #1 in the country. Homes too expensive and property taxes WAAAAYY too expensive.
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