With holiday parties, bake sales, and seasonal concerts with festive intermission snacks now behind us, you might have taken some time over your break to rethink about your policies on food allergies—or create one. Allergy emergencies are intense, and they can be downright frightening. However, implementing too strict of policies can leave food-allergic students feeling isolated and outcast.
If you didn't think about your policies over break, now is a good time to review your allergy-related protocols and policies while your school’s socials are still fresh in mind. This can ease both your and your families’ anxieties about future celebrations and engagements. Here are five ideas to keep in mind while polishing your current practices.
#1. Distribute your policy.
Protecting your students always starts with distributing your school policy. What you communicate with faculty, staff, students, and families is your first defense in reducing risks. With one in 13 school-aged children having a food allergy, most schools have adopted practices to eliminate food-triggers from the classrooms of allergic students or the campus all together. Your policies should be included in both your student and employee handbooks. It's also a good idea to have your policies accessible online.
#2. Couple policy with health forms.
At the start of each school year, your school should send home medical forms—or send an email with the link to complete an online form for a student medical record software or cloud database—for the families to complete for each child.
Along with these forms, it’s a good idea to include your policies about food-allergies. Let’s be honest, your handbooks are probably pages and pages of protocol that read like a manual. Just as overwhelming as it is for you to prepare, it’s overwhelming for your faculty and families to read and absorb every rule and guideline.
By placing your policy on food-allergy triggers alongside complementary information, your readers are more likely to comprehend and remember the guidelines.
#3. Educate your students.
Just as food allergies are increasing, so are the cases of food-allergy bullying. Kids don’t understand the extreme health risks of food allergy symptoms, including the possibility of death. It’s important to educate students about food allergies and the different degrees of reactions. Expressing the seriousness of the situation may reduce bullying. Make it clear that food will not be used as a weapon on your campus, and have a clear policy discussing how such actions will be reprimanded.
#4. Hire a full-time nurse, and train your staff.
Your school nurse is a key player in keeping your students with food-allergies (or any allergies for that matter) safe. However, all of your faculty and staff should be trained on how to administer an EPI pen as well as treating and reacting to allergy symptoms. EPI pens should be stored in the classroom of the allergic student and your school nurse's office—always within reach. Allergic reactions happen fast, and your staff needs to be equipped to respond to them just as quickly.
#5. Create a culture of acceptance.
Students with food allergies can feel like outcasts or outsiders. They may feel responsible for their friends and classmates not being able to enjoy certain favored snacks, always on guard for possible triggers, segregated by certain school policies, or simply misunderstood. Look at your school’s current practices and ask yourself if they express acceptance or isolation. If isolation is your answer, take some steps to adjust your culture.
- Engage your students in your movement by asking them to create multimedia content on the food-allergy movement.
- Involve your community by hosting an allergy-free dinner event.
- Encourage faculty to only lead classroom activities that can involve all students. For example, discourage your faculty from awarding students with food, or incorporating materials that can cause an allergic reaction into art or science lessons. Isolating a student because they are at risk of the experience is not the answer. Instead, encourage lessons that classes as a whole can participate in.
- Celebrate birthdays and other special moments with crafts, games, or activities that don’t involve food.
Additional ISM resources:
The Source for School Heads Vol. 12 No. 1 School Policies on Student Food Allergies
The Source for Private School News Vol. 11 No. 2 Bullying the Food Allergic Student
Additional ISM resources for Gold Consortium members:
I&P Vol. 36 No. 3 Addressing Bullying and Sexual Misconduct
