They're apparently upset because they think the procedures the school has put in place - to quite literally protect the allergic child's life, I might add - are "intrusive" and are "wasting academic time". So, what protective measures are so onerous that they warrant community outrage and picketing the school?
Having lunches stored outside the classroom, and students having to wash their hands before coming in and after lunch.
That's apparently worth walking a picket line outside the school with signs saying things like "Our children have rights too!", "Who's paying for all of these special measures?", "Where is the happy median?", "How much academic time has your child LOST!", and, inexplicably, "No Dogs". One parent was on-camera as saying "It's not fair for one kid to set a standard the rest of the kids have to abide by."
I don't even know what the fuck to say to this. I genuinely don't understand how a group of parents, supposedly responsible adults, thinks it's okay to picket a school to get a kid thrown out for having a fucking allergy that could kill her. Yes, let's teach our children to accept other people and play nice, unless you think you're being inconvenienced by someone else's disability - because as the report notes, the school is required to accommodate the girl's allergy because it counts as a disability under the ADA - and then it's time to break out the protest signs and make a huge fucking fuss and try to get them kicked out of school.
And those signs! "Our children have rights too!" I'm sorry, but if you think your child's right to not have to wash hir hands trumps another child's right to an education free of life-threatening circumstances, you're
Let me tell you about my experience with a life-threatening peanut allergy. There was a boy at my elementary school who had a severe peanut allergy. Parents were notified, and it was carefully explained to us that if Tim was exposed to peanuts or peanut butter or anything having peanuts in it, he could die. Even if he didn't eat it, but one of us touched him with a hand that had peanut butter residue on it from a sandwich at lunch, he could die because that's how allergic he was. And we all said, "Wow, that sucks. Okay." So accommodations were made. You'd be amazed what kids are okay with, if you just explain that it's what has to be done to protect one of them from dying. A couple of us grumbled when, instead of having peanut butter and jelly sandwiches at the camp we went to that year, we had baloney and cheese sandwiches instead, but that was really the extent of it. And I'd bet the kids of these dangling taint-hairs aren't anywhere near as upset at the "inconvenience" of accommodations made for this girl as their parents are making them out to be.
But no, now they're going to absorb even more thoroughly the selfish, disablist messages of our culture through their parents' public hissy fit: You do not ever have to accept inconvenience for anyone else's sake. It's okay to complain and make a fuss if you're ever asked to accept minor changes in order to protect someone else's health or life. Accessibility, despite being the law of the land (on paper, anyway), is not important. What's important is that the abled kids aren't inconvenienced in any way by the temerity of the disabled kids to exist and participate in public life.
Go fuck yourselves, you entitled, privileged dipshits.
