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.

Honestly, some of the responses to this are bonkers. Have you read your post back, whilst imagining standing in front of that poor mother?

Severe allergies aren’t a fad, a preference or the result of overprotective parenting. Anaphylaxis is a potentially life-threatening medical emergency. EpiPens are emergency treatment, they are not some magical forcefield that makes exposure irrelevant.

There’s an enormous difference between acknowledging that you cannot guarantee a completely nut-free environment and deliberately growing nuts inside it.

So because it’s one child, their parents should be told to “fuck off”?
Seriously? Who are you?

The measure of a decent community is surely how willing we are to make reasonable accommodations for people who are more vulnerable, even when they are a small minority. Looked in the mirror lately?

We wouldn’t ensure a school playground or access to the lovely orchard is wheelchair accessible because 51% of pupils use wheelchairs. We would do that because the child who DOES use a wheelchair has just as much right to access learning and be a part of school life and the school community as everyone else. How could you think differently? What happened to you?

Life isn’t fair. so why make it any more shitty than it needs to be? What motivates you to feel otherwise?

Yes, a nut-allergic child can stand next to a nut tree without spontaneously going into anaphylaxis. But these trees are planted inside the school grounds. Nuts don’t remain neatly attached to trees. They fall. Squirrels and other animals carry them around, bury them, crack them open and leave bits behind. Children pick things up. They dig in soil. They collect conkers, acorns, seeds, sticks and interesting things they find on the ground. Things get crushed under shoes. Things get carried around on hands. But why should that bother you? It doesn’t affect you does it…

Parents cannot demand that the local park remove every nut tree. They cannot control what another passenger eats on a train. They cannot stop shops selling nuts. They cannot control what other people eat in restaurants, at parties or in public places.
There are hundreds of risks they simply have to manage. Which is precisely why I cannot understand the determination to create an entirely optional one INSIDE THEIR SCHOOL. A place they legally have go to five days a week, unless their parents quit their jobs to home school them for your convenience. Are you feeling comfortable enough yet?

The school controls what it plants on its own land.
There are countless species of tree that could be planted in an orchard or around a school boundary.
So why choose ones that produce a common serious food allergen? Spite? Privilege? Selfishness?

What is the compelling benefit?

Is there some overwhelming educational or ecological reason that these particular nut trees absolutely have to be there?

if not… plant a different fucking tree

And yes, I think it’s sad if established trees now have to be removed. I like trees. However I’d much rather somebody had thought about this when the orchard was originally planned so that healthy trees didn’t have to come down once established.

But that’s an argument for thinking about accessibility and allergy safety properly when designing schools in the first place. It isn’t an argument for telling the parents of a child with a serious medical condition to “fuck off”. Do you see it yet? How your entitlement and rudeness affects other people…

I really cannot get past that comment.

Imagine being the parent responsible for keeping a severely allergic child safe.

Every party. Every restaurant. Every school trip. Every friend’s house. Reading labels. Checking ingredients. Asking awkward questions. Carrying emergency medication. Teaching your child, from a ridiculously young age, that something completely harmless to their friends could make them seriously ill. And that there are sadly lots of happy taytos in the world who will tell their parents to fuck off if they advocate for them.

Imagine asking their school to address something you believe presents an avoidable risk to them and being told that you what you need… what you really need, is to “fuck off”.
Where is your empathy? What happened to you? You can’t be that happy, happy taytos. With that attitude towards vulnerable kids.

Nobody is asking for the entire world to revolve around one child.
They’re asking the adults responsible for that child for most of every weekday to consider whether an avoidable source of their allergen really needs to be growing INSIDE THE SCHOOL GROUNDS.

If assessment identifies a meaningful avoidable risk, I genuinely cannot understand why removing the source would be controversial.

And for everyone saying “you can’t make the whole world safe for them”… EXACTLY. You can’t.
They already have to navigate a world that isn’t designed around their allergy. They already have to compromise, avoid things, ask questions and be more vigilant than other children.
So why the fuck can’t their school be one of the places where adults make reasonable efforts to reduce the risks that CAN be reduced?
Why should the answer to “life isn’t completely safe” be… “therefore we shouldn’t make anything safer”?

Batshit.

And why is all the responsibility being dumped onto the parents? Allergy safety should be part of the school’s policies and risk assessments so individual parents don’t have to fight these battles single-handedly while being treated as hysterical or entitled for advocating for their child.

Allergies are medical conditions. Severe reactions can kill people. That remains true however inconvenient or unlikely somebody else considers the risk.

That child matters just as much as everybody else. Even if you don’t care.

To quote you “I am shocked at the sheer lack of empathy and ignorance on this post.”

Why do you take nut allergies more seriously than milk allergies? Milk allergies kill more children than nut allergies.

I wouldn’t help. What happens if the child walks past a tree on holiday or in the woods? It’s crazy

where did I quote that?
I take all allergies seriously and I am well aware of the seriousness of milk allergies but some are easier to avoid than others aka removing a few trees which will affect no one rather than getting an entire school to go dairy free and expecting non allergy parents to be as diligent about food ingredient as allergy parents are.

Wow! Are you having a bad day? What a lecture!

So why isn’t it the same for nuts?

Milk is the leading cause of anaphylaxis in children.
Both my children have had severe reactions at school from exposure to cows milk

Benedict Blythe and Karanbir Cheema both died from exposure to cows milk at school.

It is bonkers to insist on places being nut free it we are going to continue to have a free for all with all the other major allergens.

I assume those insisting schools should be nut free would also be happy for the schools to be banned milk (and all milk products), eggs, wheat....

I’m glad you managed to read it all Jane.

“Are you having a bad day?” is such a lazy way of avoiding the substance of what someone has said. Rather than engage with a single point I made about a vulnerable child with a serious medical condition, you’ve reframed my argument as me being emotional and therefore not worth listening to.

And “what a lecture” just means I bothered to explain my reasoning 😂

If you disagree with something I actually said, disagree with it. I’m not perfect. I could probably come up with some arguments against my own post if I wanted to play devil’s advocate. I feel passionately about people being arseholes. Shoot me.

But trying to reduce a reasoned argument to a person being in a bad mood is both transparent and incredibly patronising.

I’m having a lovely evening with my family. Been volunteering all day (I agree it can be a thankless task sometimes, but we still do it, and nobody is completely altruistic, we all have our reasons) and later I’ll be getting ready to work on an acute psychiatric ward for the week.

If you want to learn about genuinely bad days, come work a couple of shifts in an understaffed NHS PICU with me.

Someone else’s ignorance doesn’t tend to translate quickly into a bad day for me.

It is incredibly irritating though.

I can guarantee even in a nut free school that plenty of the children will have a peanut butter sandwich for breakfast. Or for a snack after school and then wear the same jumper again. So the bans are also stupid because they create a false sense of security

Exactly. So not the same thing at all.

Dairy is a common ingredient in much more food products than Nuts are so in my opinion it is easier to eradicate.
Milk allergies are massively on the rise though so may be something that is banned in future, who knows.

I'm surprised you work in a PICU and yet don't know enough about allergies to realise that children can have life threatening reactions to many foods.

I would love to have seen milk and eggs banned from my children's school so I didn't have to worry every day. But I knew I couldn't ask for it.

The problem is a nut ban reinforces the idea that other allergies are benign. I have lost count of the times someone has said "at least it's not nuts" to me. My son has had life threatening anaphylaxis several times from exposure to cows milk and we still have people saying dumb stuff like that. And in his lovely "nut free" school the teachers act like products with milk in are harmless. He's had teachers dishing chocolate out in class without even thinking.

We don't need to ban it though. Just like we don't need to ban nuts. We just need to teach sensible behaviour around food, like hand washing and not sharing /throwing etc

The problem is we only treat one allergy as serious and that makes people think other allergies are not as serious. I am the parent of a severely allergic child, 14 years we’ve had to manage her being anaphylactic to CMP along with other serious medical conditions.

Not a chance would any of her schools ban dairy, not that I asked. They wouldn’t even provide her a substitute milk when children got their free milk in reception given out. The school catering team said they cannot guarantee cross contamination when providing meals and so we had to send food from home. The school wouldn’t even agree to wipe the table she’s eating her lunch at before she sits down in case someone before her has spilt something. So we taught her how to keep herself safe from a very young age. At the age of 5 she was practicing injecting oranges etc.

But ultimately this is the way to keep her safe as you can never guarantee the allergen isn’t present, this is why all the major allergy charities etc. do not support ‘nut free’ schools. It’s been proven that a) it does not reduce the number of accidental exposures and b) it leads to complacency and staff falsely being reassured regarding the level of risk. This has led to children dying in school. A child died in school from milk allergy as the EpiPen they had in school was out of date. A child died in school after being given cows milk by a member of staff.

When we enforce this 2 tier system of nuts are bad let’s ban them but let’s not ban dairy because that would inconvenience people we are saying only nut allergies are worthy of being taken seriously, only nut allergies are worthy of making sacrifices for, only nut allergies are deadly and THAT is a very very dangerous message to spread. As I’ve said before this post alone has shown how many people had no idea that milk allergy can be fatal, despite it being the leading cause of anaphylaxis related deaths in children. That’s terrifying.

Not the same thing no but it’s interesting because evidence shows avoiding nuts increases allergies and being carefully exposed to them reduces allergies. Makes you wonder if in years to come we will see all these nut free schools causing more children to become allergic to them.

Absolutely there will be kids bringing in nut products that is something that would be near on impossible to police but in this case we are talking about relocating a few trees on school grounds that are ‘possibly’ shedding allergens. It’s not a big deal and affects no one. As I have mentioned the op needs to go back to the school and hand responsibility to them. This is a risk that they do not need to put on themselves.

My children have outgrown nearly all their allergies now (late teens), including the ones so severe I was told they didn't expect them to outgrow them

I am convinced it's because we didn't try and make them live in an allergen free bubble

I don’t think I said milk should be banned or even nuts for that matter only that one is much easier to ban than the other. Relocating a tree is an easy fix to minimise risk.
Definitely agree on the awareness though but you can’t expect other kids/parents to be as diligent as you which is a worry.

Exactly this. Constantly I come across the perception that other allergies aren't as serious. In particular in teaching staff. I see them take risks with other allergens that they definitely wouldn't take with nuts

You need to have a serious chat with your schools SLT if they act like milk products are harmless and you have an allergic child.

Believe me I did. Repeatedly.

But after fighting the battle time and again with different schools and teachers and clubs I have realised the error is just deeply ingrained in current thinking. People can't grasp that milk is as lethal as nuts and nut bans reinforce this misunderstanding

I know that this is well meaning … but on rereading the OP’s posts, the school owns the trees and wants eight of them gone. So whether the nut trees are actually dangerous is a bit irrelevant. The school have been told to “do something”, they have decided that this is what they’ll do (and they will have communicated this to the parents).

I am sure that the school would rather not deal with this. Which is why they are attempting to pass it over to the elderly volunteers to deal with. If I were one of the volunteers, I would say that the job is not what I signed up for and the school will need to arrange this themselves. Maybe I’d give them the number of a couple of gardeners.

If the school were to get unpleasant about it, I may consider stepping down. Perhaps seeing whether the church next door would like a small orchard planted and could do with volunteers to show children around it.

Animals (squirrels, mice. some birds) can open the hard shells meaning there can be bits of nut lying around.

It is very interesting and there’s a definite theory that you may be right. We looked into exposure therapy for my daughter but it relies on the immune system ‘recognising’ the allergen and she is treated with immunosuppressants for one of her medical conditions so they said it wouldn’t be suitable for her as her immune system isn’t able to mount a response.

Thank you so much for your post @amoobaa.