The blogosphere is all agog over the recently-released report on the disputed CBS story about President Bush’s National Guard service, which details rampant dishonesty, bias, and unprofessional behavior at the network. While the poli-bloggers focus on such petty, unimportant things, ZeroIntelligence.Net has the scoop on the real travesty facing our country today - the "ghettoization" of PB&J-eaters:
Savannah Dowling is a typical 8-year-old girl; much of her protein comes from peanut butter sandwiches. However, if she wants to bring one to Central Indiana's Pleasant View Elementary School, she has to eat it at a special table in the cafeteria to accommodate one first grader with a severe allergy. Soon she'll have to take her lunch to an area the school is calling the "peanut gallery" so the one child with the peanut allergy isn't affected.
"I don't think everybody should have to suffer because of one kid," said Mike Raper, a critic of the idea and fiancé of Savannah's mother. "I think it's a terrible precedent. Basically, because there's nowhere to draw the line. You've got people allergic to milk, wheat. My own son's diabetic. There's just no where to draw that line."
The "one kid" in question is the line, apparently - or at least, that's what his parents claim:
The boy's parents refused to be interviewed but said their child's allergy warrants extraordinary safeguards.
"He does not have to ingest it for his air to constrict and he loses the ability to breathe," the parents wrote in a statement. "We have the medical evidence that shows that our son has one of the worst allergies on record for this food."
I guess it would politically incorrect to suggest that it might be safer, you know, for this kid to sit apart from everyone else. ZeroIntelligence's response is nicer than mine:
That's a genuine shame, but so what? Reasonable measures might include notifying the teachers so they can keep an eye on what the kid tries to put in his mouth and making sure the school nurse understands the problem and has emergency treatment available. It is most definitely not reasonable to restrict the entire student body for the special needs of one student.
Be sure to read his comments, too. Many question why the child's parents are sending him to a public school in the first place. Another commenters points out that the school first banned peanut products entirely, which was not what the parents had requested be done:
The ban was started at the school of about 450 students just west of Muncie after an administrative hearing in November that involved the child's parents, state education officials and an attorney for the Mount Pleasant school district's special education cooperative...
"The compromise is what we asked for in the first place because of all the issues that go along with the peanut ban," said the father, whom the newspaper did not name. "We never asked for a complete ban."
Posted by kswygert at January 10, 2005 03:19 PM