LYNNFIELD — Parents advocated for the ability to opt their children out of a lunchroom policy that requires students who have been diagnosed with a life-threatening food allergy and those who have been prescribed with an EpiPen to eat at nut-safe tables during a School Committee meeting.
Ashley Staab, a parent of two students at Summer Street Elementary School, said that the current “one size fits all” policy of the district’s Life-Threatening Allergies Management Guidelines is not effectively serving the population that it was intended to support.
“My specific request is that the parents’ ability to opt out of the mandatory restricted-seating assignments at lunch be added back into the policy,” Staab said. “My son has been sitting there since he entered kindergarten last September, even though he is not allergic to nuts or peanuts.”
She added that anyone sitting at the nut-safe table could be eating foods that contain sesame seeds or chickpeas, her son’s two main allergens.
“How is this policy protecting him? The answer is, it is not,” Staab said.
Staab said that she and her husband have provided formal written requests to have their son removed from the table, as well as documentation from allergists and physicians at Boston Children’s Hospital approving their requests. However, she said the requests for exemption were denied because of the district’s policy and revisions made by the School Committee two years ago.
She also said that through research she conducted by speaking with other families, educators, and administrators, she learned other communities, such as Peabody and Lynn, have an “opt-out parents’ choice” policy.
“Parents’ voices should matter and we should have the final say in what makes sense for our child’s health and safety,” Staab said. “We need to create an environment that prioritizes safety and prioritizes their social and emotional health, and in my opinion, the current model is not supporting either.”
School Committee Chair Kate DePrizio told Staab that she empathizes with her as a parent, and acknowledged the importance of students being able to have downtime at lunch.
“That peer interaction, that engagement, that is like a relief from the entire day of how you’ve had to sustain holding it together all day,” DePrizio said.
Nadine Desiderio, who has three children at Huckleberry Hill Elementary School, said that one of them has sat at the nut-safe table for the past three years, even though her child’s allergists have sent letters of approval to the school to allow her to sit with her peers at the other tables.
“So trusting these people who know her health best, along with my husband and I, I am disappointed this policy has created more harm,” Desiderio said.
Desiderio said that her child just wants to sit with her friends at lunch. She added that she has been working on the matter for a couple of years.
DePrizio said that the next steps would be for the administrative leadership team to hold multiple meetings with principals, nurses, and other district leaders.
“They would start to discuss the issue, then it would come to us as a policy review, so then we would be able to take it into consideration,” DePrizio said. “You can imagine, we’ll also have to look at some medical things, legal things, exhaust all of those before the policy is reviewed.”
Interim Superintendent Tom Geary said that a meeting regarding the matter will be held soon.
“This is sort of our first chance to discuss it as a group,” Geary said.
