Mendolonium

Long-time blog readers will recall the saga of finding an appropriate elementary school in Pasadena, California.  After, quite literally, years of school tours, speaking with other parents, and applying for schools and lotteries we choose a small, private, secular elementary school, Friends Western School (FWS), near our home that was organized as a parent cooperative.  As a cooperative the school is a non-profit corporation, chartered by the parents, run by a parent board of directors, and all functions other than teaching are done by the parents  (the teachers are paid, credentialed teachers).

Well, after all that we still completely and utterly screwed up the decision on where to send Thomas to school.  The wheels didn’t just come off of the [school] bus, the damned bus exploded and went up in flames.

Long story, short:

Two weeks before the start of the current (2012-2013) school year, we were forced out of FWS and Thomas is now repeating kindergarten at another local private school.

Long story, long:

Thomas enjoyed his time at FWS last year and was excited to go to school every day.  He was happy there and his happiness and comfort with a school had been paramount among my concerns.  During our time at FWS we saw a number of things which gave us some concern.  We expected this – it was a relatively new school (in its second year as a parent cooperative) and we knew that there would be growing pains as well as a lot of time required by all the parents to make it work.  The concerns started relatively small, the school day NEVER started on time; an issue we raised that the school leadership was dismissive of.  Fine, we figured we would bring it up again at a later time.  Then we participated in the school’s annual fundraiser; a huge amount of work that raised very little money – most of it from the parents themselves.  We suggested a couple of ideas for improving the net payoff of the fundraiser.  They were dismissed.  Fine.  Two families abruptly left the school.  When I asked for an explanation we were told that the details were confidential.  I contacted the family involved and they had a very different story to tell.  We began to worry a bit.  We were told by another parent that we were nominated to be elected to the school board, yet the person in charge of nominations never informed us.  Odd, but with three kids we didn’t have time to serve on the board anyway.  Three more families told us that they were leaving the school.  We wondered if the school would be able to stay afloat.  Over the summer our concerns grew as we saw the school struggle with signing a lease for the school campus.  We decided that we were still committed to FWS for the 2012-2013 school year, but started, sadly, to discuss if we would need another option for the following (2013 – 2014) school year.

Then, two weeks before school started Jeff came home from a school work day and told me that he had heard, in casual conversation with a teacher, that every other Friday would be an early dismissal so that the teachers could have paid planning time; there was also some plan to have parent-supervised “free-play” so that other parents who could not pick up their children at the early time would have free childcare.  I was puttering around the internet when Jeff said this and I closed my laptop and said, “What the hell?”   I tried to make sense of it;  our parent cooperative school had made a major decision about the school day – shaving 6% of the instructional time off of the year without consulting or even informing all the parents.  That couldn’t be right.  We were working parents with three other young children.  Our lives are scheduled down to 15 minute increments.  A change such of this would wreak havoc with our carefully planned schedule.  There was no way I was comfortable with Thomas spending three hours in “free” play watched by some unspecified group of parents.  I worried he wasn’t getting enough academics as it was – I certainly didn’t want him to get less!  I got very angry but hoped that somehow this was all a misunderstanding.  I trusted this school to take good care of my child. I paid this school a lot of money to do so.   At the very least I had a right to know who was supervising my child and when and I had a right to know that information as soon as it was available.

I put myself in the shoes of the other parents; many of whom did not yet know about this information.  I felt strongly that we all had a right to know and so I posted for all parents to see on our school’s online forum the gist of what I knew, along with the statement that I was very upset over how this issue was handled.  I expected a discussion of the decision would follow.  What I didn’t expect was to be told to stop talking.   But that’s exactly what happened.  I was told not to post about this issue in full view of the entire school.  That I should only be discussing this issue – any issue- with the board.  That other parents did not have the right to know. We were told specifically that the board was concerned about how this “made the school look to new parents” and that we were “poisoning the waters” of the cooperative.

Well you can imagine how well I took that.

We spoke both via phone and in person with members of the board and our conversations raised more questions.  It is still not clear to us who made the decision (we know that it was not all the members of the current board) and when the decision was planned to be communicated to the parents.  I received patronizing and classist statements about how “many families want to and are able to pick up their child early”  and that “for you working parents” free “childcare” (the supervised free play) was going to be arranged.  I felt as if I was being spoken to as benveloent dictator speaks to a mere peon.  I asked what was to stop them from making unilateral decisions in the future.  I was told that I should trust them and that they would “always have our best interests at heart”.  There was no choice but to leave the school.  I could not trust them to take care of my son.

We consider what was done to be a huge breech of trust and a breech of contract.  Just as we scrupulously honored our contract to attend membership meetings, volunteer at the school, and pay tuition we expected that the school should honor its obligation to provide our child with the instructional time, from credentialed teachers, that was agreed upon when we joined the school.  That is clearly not the case.  In fact, when we raised this issue, we were told by the board that their was no such guarantee.  Quoting directly from an email we received from the FWS board: “The tuition contract does not state that children will receive instruction from a credentialed teacher from 8:30-3 Monday through Friday.”  I laughed at the absurdity of that email.  No private school contract I have ever read says such a thing – but it is implied.  I can only imagine that if I signed a contract to purchase a house, did a walk through, and then when I actually got the keys to the house found that 6% of the house had been removed, that might be a breech of contract.  It is no different with a school contract.

In the midst of all of this I decided to organize Thomas’ schoolwork from kindergarten.  I like to save examples of his work and artwork and so I laid everything out chronologically before putting it in scrapbook.  When I did so it shocked me to see that Thomas’ writing had not improved whatsoever during his five months at FWS.  Over this summer we also noticed that Thomas’ math skills had regressed when we saw him counting on his fingers.  I asked him where he learned to count that way and he replied “school”.  I was saddened to see my son who could do addition, subtraction, and even simple multiplication and division in his head revert to preforming simple addition and subtraction with his fingers.  There was enough to do at FWS that Thomas wasn’t bored so we never realized the extent to witch the academics were lacking.  But it is now clear that he was never challenged there.

Other than food allergies and potentially devastating prenatal diagnoses, this incident has been the single most stressful incident of parenting yet.  We were very, very lucky to find a last minute placement for Thomas in a fantastic local private school (of course more expensive).  I called about public school but we did not make it to the top of the waitlist for the local public charter school and our neighborhood public school is absolutely abysmal – there is no way in hell I would send my child there.  Given our new school’s very rigorous academic standards and September 1st cutoff date for kindergarten (meaning that Thomas would have been the youngest 1st grader by over 2 months) we decided to consider our time at FWS to be pre-K and have Thomas spend this year in kindergarten.  A week and a half into the new school year Thomas is thriving and seems well-suited to his role as one of the older, more mature kindergarteners.  The academic damage will be undone.  But I can’t help but still feel like a failure.    I did everything I possibly could to find a good school for my son and yet it still wasn’t enough.  As someone who moved around a lot as child it breaks my heart to know that Thomas will probably attend at least three elementary schools now (we will probably not be able to afford three kids in private school and will eventually move to another, better school district).  I had wanted so badly to give him a stable school experience.  I never, ever thought that sending my son to kindergarten would be such an ordeal.  We will move beyond this and we already feel that the new school is much better place than FWS was.  But we will be dealing the consequences for some time to come.  It will take months for Thomas to make new friends.  We had to buy a second car because the new school is too far away to bike.  I have had to increase my hours at work.  Sometimes being a grown-up is damned hard.

So Thomas starts kindergarten in two weeks at a small (32 families!), private, secular elementary school.

The decision for Thomas to start kindergarten, quite unconventionally, in the month of February was brought about by the perfect storm of him having a new baby sister, growing obviously bored in his current preschool environment, and our first choice school having a spot available for him.

After the New Year I started to fantasize a bit about what life would have been like if Thomas had started kindergarten this past fall (in 2011).  Being home with three children was so constantly difficult.  I wondered aloud how my mother had done it and then realized later that she hadn’t, exactly – I was six years old and about to start first grade when my baby sister Sara (the third child in our family) was born.  And my mom hadn’t had to drop me off and pick me up from school – I took the bus.  Then Thomas’ preschool teachers began to gently indicate that Thomas was obviously beyond their preschool’s curriculum (where he attends three days per week).  Finally, a couple of weeks ago we attended an open house for a small, private school that we had applied to (and been accepted to) last year.  Jeff, I, and Thomas fell in love with the little school even more this year than last.  On a whim and a bit of a prayer I asked if they might have room for Thomas in kindergarten for the remaining half of this school year and after submitting an application he was in.

The process of finding the right school for our family has been a two year old odyssey that I never anticipated would be so arduous.  When I was in school (not so many years ago – I’m only 33!) the decision on where to send one’s child to school pretty much boiled down to the local public school or Catholic school.  One might move to a “better” school district, but most public schools in middle class neighborhoods were good enough.  Now in Pasadena we can potentially choose from any of the district’s 20 or so elementary schools through a lottery system, two public charter schools, and numerous private schools – both religious and secular with tuition ranging from $5,000 per year to over $20,000 (yes, for kindergarten).  There are almost too many choices.  During this process I often wished that Pasadena public schools didn’t allow choosing a different school other than one’s assigned neighborhood school – I think that many of the individual schools would be better if we had to make do with what we were given.

I never seriously thought that we would choose private school.  Long before we had children I mentioned the idea to Jeff, the son of two devoted public school teachers, and he told me that he would never consider such an option.  In my typical “over think every problem to death” style I toured three private schools, one public charter school, and seven Pasadena Unified School District (PUSD) elementary schools in our search for what was best for our family.  I liked all of the private schools quite a bit – save for the tuition and for some of the schools the distance from our house.  I liked the public charter school, but had some reservations.  The PUSD schools we toured were Longfellow, Webster, McKinley, Hamilton, Willard, Norma Coombs, and Don Benito.  At the end of last year we also attended an open house at Willard, the PUSD school Thomas had been accepted to which was partly responsible for us changing our minds as to Thomas attending school last year.  I also spoke with about ten parents who had children who were either currently or recently enrolled in private schools, the charter school, and PUSD.  Some of those parents were very happy with their experience, some were so unhappy that they had moved their children to other schools.  A mother in Thomas’ class is also a former PUSD student herself and her perspective was valuable.

PUSD has a reputation as being a “bad” school district.  I know a number of parents who simply took that reputation at face value and didn’t ever consider sending their child to a public school in Pasadena.  I set out to form my own opinion.  There was a great deal of variation between the schools I saw.  But there were some consistencies across the board.  First off, I never once walked into a school that I would have, even remotely, considered bad.  Pasadena is a district with a significant population of students from low income backgrounds; many of whom English is not their  first language.  Despite this, you would not of know it to look at the students I saw and their work; I was impressed by what I saw.    Overall, I felt that PUSD would provide a solid education in the fundamentals.  All the schools were clean and well kept.  I also saw parents volunteering at every school – making programs such as art, music, and science possible.  At every school the principal lead the tour and was enthusiastic about their school.  I would strongly encourage every parent in Pasadena to look at the public schools themselves and form their own opinion. But we didn’t choose a PUSD school and here’s why:

• While the individual schools encourage parent involvement – the involvement is limited to the periphery of the core academic mission of the schools.  The parents have basically zero ability to influence such basics as the core language arts and math curriculum, the length of the school day and year, the timing of the school day, and the selection of teachers .   Yes, there are wonderful parents doing art, music, science, and school gardening.  But the entire public school system is set up in such a way that local, and by extension, parental control is very limited.  This is not a problem limited to PUSD, but rather a nationwide issue as much of what a public school does is now tightly controlled by federal, state, and district mandates.
• There is a constant emphasis on test scores.  Banners proclaim a school’s score everywhere one looks.  Many principals were quite frank in stating that the majority of the school day is devoted to core academics in preparation for tests.  None of the principals I spoke with liked this and tried to insert additional content where possible, but it is quite clear that “accountability” and “assessment” rule the public school system.
• At every PUSD school I saw one or two teachers and their students who seemed disengaged and vacant.   I saw teachers showing videos on phonics while students stared slack-jawed at a TV screen, teachers  “reading” books by flipping pages as a CD spoke the words while the students looked around the room, and students working on “educational” computer programs many whom were so small that the headphones kept slipping of their confused little heads.  Basically I saw disinterested teachers, babysitting disengaged kids.  You had better believe that if I had a group of people in my office or I was giving a presentation that I would be at my very best.  The fact that several teachers we saw were so distant while their “boss” (the principal) and a group of parents were observing them was very concerning.  The disengagement of students and teachers that I saw somewhere at every school was my single biggest concern.

If it sounds like I am trying to justify my decision to send Thomas to a private school; the truth is that I am.  I wanted Pasadena public schools to be the best choice for our family.  I believe in the idea of a free, non-discriminatory, equal education for all.  I am an inherently frugal (some might say cheap) person and it is very difficult for me to justify spending thousands of dollars a year on private school.  But in the end PUSD schools too often looked mechanical to me.  I could envision Thomas being happy, at times, in some of the classrooms that I saw.  But also envisioned Thomas being bored and feeling out of place; particularly in the early grades where much of the material would be review, at best, for him.  I simply couldn’t shake the rigid, institutional sense that pervaded the tours.  PUSD was simply too much of a risk for us right now; a risk that we would be taking anew every year based on the teachers that our children would be assigned.  Fundamentally every time I thought about Thomas going to one of the public schools – randomly assigned to a teacher, in a class with 30 or so other students, I just felt anxious.

We did consider moving to a “better” school district (i.e., South Pasadena, La Canada, La Cresenta, Arcadia, parts of Glendale, and even Sierra Madre) where we might feel more comfortable with the public schools.  If we stay in Southern California in the long term this is a strong potential option for us.  Based on the current state of Pasadena’s middle and high schools by the time Thomas goes to middle school (six years from now, but I know that will go by far more quickly than one might think) we will have to either choose private school or move.  Three children in private school will be very challenging for us financially; buying a house in a more expensive school district is cheaper than three children in public school.   We didn’t move now for two reasons.  First, with a newborn we simply weren’t ready to sell our house, buy another one, and generally make our live even more insane than they already are for a period of time.  Second, it isn’t at all clear to me from my research that the elementary schools in these “better” districts are, in fact, any better.  The schools in these sought after districts have high test scores but that is almost certainly due to demographics (i.e., they have far fewer students from disadvantaged backgrounds) rather than any inherent superiority of the school system.  Comparing test scores with demographics indicates that PUSD is actually doing a better than expected job at educating its elementary school students.  And many of the concerns that I had with PUSD above are endemic to the public school system regardless of how wealthy that system is.  Even if money were no object, moving is not necessarily a good solution for us.

There was a time when I worried what school would give us the best options for middle school and beyond or what school would be best for Thomas in a few years time when he might need more structured academics.  But you can only solve so many problems at once and in the end I had to simply ask, “What school did I feel good about Thomas attending right now?”  Once I removed the extraneous questions the decision was fairly simple.  And then, the whipped cream to our school sundae was added when our chosen school told us that they had space for Thomas to start kindergarten mid-year.  The school we choose had everything we were looking for save one thing; it’s not free.  But every kid and teacher I have seen at our new school appeared happy and engaged.  The school is very well rounded; giving the students instruction in language arts, math, social science, science, drama, art, music, soccer, and community.  The kids are regularly outside three times a day (morning snack, lunch, and afternoon snack) with the teacher able to take the kids outside whenever else she or he pleases.  The grades of the school interact quite a lot – producing a newspaper and a yearly school play together, spending one lunch per week at a local park playing soccer, taking field trips and hikes.  The school is just under one mile from our house and we expect to commute there exclusively by walking or biking.  (We can still get buy with only our one car!)  There is on-site, highly quality after school care if we need it.  His kindergarten class has nine (9!) students and no class will ever have more than 14.  The school is a parent co-op meaning that the parents handle all the administration, all the janitorial work, etc.  The only employees of the school are the teachers.  This means more work for us, but we gain so much with that work.  Most importantly it means that we (the parents) set the curriculum and become part of a community of families that are all working to make the school the best that it can be.

Thomas went to his new school for a visit this past Monday.  He asked me to pick out some clothes for him that would make him look “spiffy” for his visit at school and it hit me that he is starting real school- elementary school – in two weeks.  It will be in February, rather than September, but I’ll need to pick out some preppy clothes for him, get him a backpack, and he’ll stand in front of the house and in front of his new school and we’ll take those memorable “first day of school pictures”.  I know that a lot of mothers feel a bittersweet pang at the thought of their firstborn “baby” heading off to school, but after two years of losing sleep about schools and listening to Thomas moan about being bored on a daily basis I am just all out of angst.  We’ve done the best we can with the information and circumstances that we have.  And that’s all any of us can do.

Since we found out that Thomas received a coveted lottery spot at Willard Elementary School for kindergarten Jeff and I have spent several evenings engaged in the same futile conversation.  It goes something like this:

Gina:  We need to figure out a schedule for next year.

Jeff (sighing heavily):  OK.  I know.  Let’s start with Monday.

Gina:  Are we starting with before the new baby is born or after the new baby is born?  Because Thomas will only be in school for about 6 weeks before she gets here and then I’ll be on maternity leave and on a different schedule.  And then after maternity leave a different schedule still.

Jeff:  Before.

Gina:  OK.  On Mondays I will drop Thomas off at school and then go to work.  You will bike Theo to school and then go to work.  And then…Monday is that crappy day where Thomas gets out of school at 12:30.

Jeff:  12:30?  That’s ridiculous.

Gina:  Yes, but you knew that.  All the PUSD schools have a short day on Monday.

Jeff:  But it is just so stupid.  How do they expect working parents to deal with that?

Gina:  I don’t think they care.  So what are we doing on Monday?

Jeff:  I guess I will have to bike over from work and pick him up and then take him back to my office or to his after school program.  I really don’t want him to do after school though.

Gina:  Me either.  I think being away from home from 7:30 in the morning until 6:00 at night is a lot for a five year old.  It’s also not cheap – about $4000 a year for three days a week – not counting summer.

Jeff:  So what do we do?  Do I just take him back to my office and let him hang out with Legos and drawing and work on homework?

Gina (joking):  I think that you could put him in lab and teach him to do some simple synthesis.  He would love that.

Jeff:  He would love that.  I don’t really want him exposed to organic chemicals at age five though – he might want children someday.

Gina:  Are you going to be able to bike over and pick him up and get back in time for your lab?

Jeff:  I don’t know…it’s four miles…I guess I might have to drive.

Gina:  Which means we need a second car…

And then our heads exploded from the complexity of it all.

Not really.  What really happens is Jeff grabs a bag of Hershey’s kisses (his drug of choice) and I make myself a plate of nachos (Baby Girl’s craving of choice) and we agree that we should work on the Tuesday schedule instead, maybe it will be easier and we’ll come back to Monday later.  I’ll spare you the painful transcript, but the Tuesday conversation goes about as well as the Monday conversation – me trying to figure out how I am going to deal with waking up a napping Theo (I don’t work on Tuesdays) plus a newborn to get to school to pick up Thomas at 2:15.  We talk about carpooling with other families but with a Prius as our car we’re lucky we can fit three car seats across the back – there is no way we could accommodate another child unless they ride shotgun (illegal!) or we strap them on to the roof (even more illegal!).  And we’re back in second car territory – just so we can get our son to and from school, because our neighborhood school is so awful that we can’t even consider sending him there.

I am so very frustrated.  I didn’t have children so that I could spend all day in the car chauffeuring them around.  I don’t own a car that is paid for in full so that I can now “trade up” to  a big gas guzzling SUV or minivan.  I am completely confounded by a school system that has resulted in kids within a one block radius of us attending five different elementary schools.  I know that as parents we make a lot of sacrifices for our children and I do so gladly but this is not sacrifice – this is insanity.  It isn’t good for the kids, it isn’t good for the environment, and it isn’t good for parents.

Approaching kindergarten reminds me of how I felt four years ago searching for the right daycare for Thomas.  There were lots of options – none of them good.  Yes I have high standards, but many of the places I saw weren’t just mediocre – they were downright scary.  Kids parked in front of TVs for hours on end munching on fruit loops, toddlers sitting in diapers bulging with filth, infants being admonished for crying.  In the end we choose a daycare that we thought would be adequate and ended up pulling Thomas out a few months later when our concerns exploded on a day where it became clear the head provider had been lying to us.  We juggled childcare between Jeff, I, my mother, and my sister until after more than two years of waiting a spot finally opened up at the center we are at now.

I don’t want the same thing to happen to Thomas in elementary school.  I grew up changing schools and it had a profoundly negative effect on me.  I want to pick the right school for our kids on the first try and I am just not convinced that Willard or any of the PUSD schools are it.  I am not sure where that leaves us, however, by sheer luck Thomas’ birthday is such that he may go to kindergarten either this year or next.  Although it is not the financially savvy option we could keep Thomas at his current daycare/preschool for another year.  We could, essentially, punt.

In the end I keep thinking that if we are feeling this much stress over sending Thomas to Willard, spending this amount of energy trying to figure out how to make the schedule work, literally losing sleep over what to do that we should just wait another year.  Life shouldn’t be this hard.  I think we need to give ourselves the next year to find another way.

Last week we gathered our paperwork and headed to Thomas’ new school to officially enroll him for kindergarten.   In between filling out our address at least a dozen times and asking basic questions such as if there was a kindergarten orientation (“Yes!  The day before school starts.”) an old issue reared its ugly Medusa-like head:  Food allergies.

We’ve relaxed considerably about food allergies in our home over the past two years.  Thomas is now old enough to understand his allergies and is quite reasonable about the restrictions that they impose.  Even better, Thomas is no longer allergic to eggs, garlic, and pepper – three ubiquitous foods that we all sorely missed having in the house.  But the fact the remains that Thomas is still allergic to soy, peanuts, and sesame.  And because having children with the same food allergies would make life just too easy, Theo is allergic to onions and cashews.

Thomas’ allergy to sesame is anaphylactic and thus, requires an epi-pen.  During the enrollment process I casually asked, “I am sure you see this all the time, but how do you deal with food allergies?”  Given that the prevalence of childhood food allergies in our society is rampant, the answer I got was shocking to me in its ignorance.  The office staff cheerily explained to me that we could meet with the school nurse to go over the specific food allergies and an action plan and that school staff were trained in using an epi-pen.  Sensible and reassuring.  The office staff then went on to tell me that at the beginning of the year each classroom teacher would send a letter home to each student listing the food allergies in the classroom to inform the other parents of what foods were not safe for classroom treats or lunches.  I started to get nervous.  I immediately wondered, how could other parents – most with no experience of food allergies, half of whom do not reside in homes where English is the primary language, be expected to read labels the way that we do?  How many parents know that hummus, a favorite lunch item, is chock full of sesame seeds?  How many parents know that soy resides in nearly every processed food item in this country?  Even our own parents and close friends, who are well aware of the risks, have made mistakes from time to time.  It unfair and unrealistic to expect other parents to carry our burden.   And with multiple food allergic children in the same class does the collective diet of the class become so restrictive that parents are left sending their children to school with lunches of rice and potatoes?  The very notion was ridiculous and dangerous.  I told the office staff as much and they then offered that if I was really concerned, there was a special table in the cafeteria for food allergic kids.  It was then that I began to get upset.   A “special” table simply because my son, though no fault of his own, cannot eat some common foods.  He doesn’t need to sit at a special table full of kids with food allergies.  Every day, at his current school, he eats next to children who bring items in their lunches that he is allergic to and in over two years at school he has never had an incident.  Why?  Because his school has a strict no-sharing policy.  Students eat only what their parents provide them.  Period.  Snacks and treats are baked on site at the school and the school is responsible for every ingredient in the provided food.

The solution for elementary schools is similarly simple.  If outside snacks or treats are allowed parents should be able to state that they do not want their child receiving food that they [the parents] did not provide and should be allowed to provide an alternative.  Most importantly, while I am sure it would be met with protests of “not enough money in the budget to pay for adequate lunchtime supervision” the school should implement a strict no-sharing policy for all students.  Food allergies or not, I actually think that most parents want to know what their kids are eating at school and would be happy to know that their children are eating what they [the parents] provided or paid for (in the case of hot lunch).  While implementation may indeed require extra supervision at first, such a policy would quickly become routine if implemented from kindergarten on and if penalties for infraction (maybe the offending students could go sit by themselves at a “special” table) were adequately persuasive.

Clearly it is my job as a parent of a food allergic child to prepare him for the real world.  Thomas already knows not to eat food at a party or play date without checking the ingredients first.  He is as scared of his reaction to the forbidden foods as I am.  It does not do him any good to pretend to eliminate the his forbidden foods in the world around him – he needs to learn how to manage his allergies.  But his school must help him in his quest.  I worry that Thomas, taught not to share food by me, will be tempted by another student’s offer to share a cookie at lunchtime, or will one day encounter a birthday treat brought in by a parent at school, or will be offered a cracker used by a teacher as a reward.  He might protest the food, but the adult will reassure him, “We know about your allergies – this is safe.”  But that adult will be mistaken.  They won’t have thought to check for soy in a cookie.  They won’t have thought to look for sesame seeds as an ingredient on that box of crackers.  And Thomas, not even five years old when he eterns kindergarten, will experience an understandable lack in judgement and eat the proffered food.  Such mistakes are, of course, what the epi-pen is for, but every effort must be made by the school to ensure that that scenario never happens.

Life-threatening food allergies are a particularly frustrating problem for parents to deal with.  Food allergies are misunderstood, downplayed, written off as hysterical parenting.  But I have seen my childrens’ skin explode, in a matter of seconds, into red angry hives.  I have seen my son struggle for air mere minutes after a skin exposure to one of his allergens.  I have held my child in my arms as he projectile vomited over and over again utnil his stomach was empty of the offending food.  Food allergies are a serious medical problem and deserve the same intelligent response as any other medical condition a child might have.   I think my sons are the most special boys in the world, but they should never have to be excluded from other kids, forced to sit at a “special” table, just to keep them safe.