School telling us to remove nut trees from community orchard

[Calling]

We are in a local voluntary group and local people planted an orchard in the grounds of a school, for the school.

Now, the school has written to say that we have to remove the nut trees because one pupil has a bad nut allergy.

There are fruit and nut trees, that the local people planted some years ago and we have put a lot of work into weeding and watering. The yield was actually for the kids and we are volunteering with the school with and nature sessions outside.

Before anyone says we are potential child killers, we do understand the importance of safety. There is a management plan in place, but the school has been asked by a parent to remove our trees.
I do feel disheartened - nobody in the school said no to nut trees originally.

Wait til you find out about pollen! Mind Blown.

I'm not sure if anyone has replied to this, but schools haven't necessarily been told to do this. It's more that they shouldn't advertise themselves as "nut free" schools because that can't realistically be guaranteed, and the title can lull people into a false sense of security.

Why can’t the child be contained in the school building away from the trees or told not to go near the vicinity of the tree? One child. Easy fix. They’ll be gone in 4/5 years anyway.

As I said earlier, there’s no need to remove the whole trees, just cut off the flowers/unripe nuts over the spring and summer months and there won’t be any nuts to fall anyway. It’s not that onerous a task if you’re pruning anyway and ten minutes a week would easily catch the vast majority of nuts and mitigate any potential risk before it develops.
My DS was allergic to milk proteins and would react on contact with dairy products. He spent a lot of his time at school dosed up on antihistamines or sent home early to recover because school wouldn’t take any measures to keep his environment clear of milk (even down to wiping his lunch table with a clean cloth). I agree with the many PPs sentiments about the disparity between how risks from nuts are viewed compared to other allergens.
Nuts are not a special case among food allergens, and nut allergies are not necessarily more severe than other allergies.

I don’t have a comment on allergies - nut or otherwise.

I think the issue here is organisations relying on free volunteers and then expanding the scope of their role. The volunteers (some in their 70s and 80s) put their hands up to plant and look after trees and do some sessions with the children - sounds fairly pleasant and rewarding. The school now want them to dig up a bunch of the trees and start again with new ones - a really hard task.

You see it quite often with PTAs. I once put in place a role description of what our PTA was actually for (this was for the parents - some of whom wanted us to get involved in something that was nothing to do with us). People want a thing done, there isn’t any scope or budget for it so they decide that the people who already give up their time can do this other thing as well. Then they are surprised and disappointed when the volunteers get cross and won’t do any more.