Reply to Can I send my middle schooler with Advil/Tylenol?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My child needed Lactaid with dairy. We had to fill out the form and DD had to go to the nurse’s office every day before lunch and any time there was an ice cream party (although knowing her she might have skipped the ice cream rather than bother). [/quote]

I’m the teacher who posted above. My child also needs a particular medication. The nurse has it and she goes regularly to get it. It’s a mild nuisance, but it hardly impacts her day. [/quote]

Calling Lactaid a medication is a stretch.  As a teacher, do school lunches seem leisurely to you?  Hypothetically, if it takes 5 minutes a day to detour to the nurse, that’s 25 minutes a week. If there are 36 weeks in a school year, that’s 15 hours/year that she spent not eating, not learning, not taking a break and interacting socially with her peers, but jumping through bureaucratic hoops.  If the school system asked you to give up 5 minutes of your lunch every day for a new regulation, would you shrug it off it as a mild nuisance, or resent it as something that needlessly impacted your day?  It was doable, and she did it, but it was ridiculous. [/quote]

The point is it’s a RULE. Students have died because of pills being passed around the schools. Have we all forgotten so soon?

I care about my students. I want them to be safe, and that’s getting a lot harder to do. You see this as an inconvenience. I see this as a slippery slope.

But ultimately, this argument is pointless. The policy exists. If you allow your child to carry medication, then accept the consequences if they are caught. [/quote]

I understand it’s a RULE. Since you seem to have ignored part of my post, we followed the RULE. My child did not carry the “medication”.

I also want children to be safe. I think some policies (including this one) become less about the child’s welfare than making bureaucrats happy when they become overly rigid. I understand the slippery slope, but it seems like there are fairly substantive differences between fentanyl, tylenol/ibuprofen, and lactaid.

By the way, you never answered my question. Would you be fine giving up 5 minutes of your lunch every day to satisfy a new regulation?[/quote]

I rarely get an uninterrupted lunch, so your question doesn’t really land the way you want it to. I do what I have to do.

If you want children safe, don’t pick and choose rules. While you’re choosing not to follow this policy, others are choosing not to follow others. It’s hard to enforce rules when we make exceptions for everything.

This isn’t about making bureaucrats happy. (How would it even??) It’s about safe schools. Sure, your kid is popping a Tylenol. The kid next to your kid has Oxy. See the problem? Who is policing this if we say some pills are safe to have and others aren’t? Who is watching what is swapped? I’m a little busy teaching your kids, so I have to hope that people are following policy and being good community members.

The policy is on my side. Don’t like it? Then change it. Loosening rules doesn’t seem to work well in the long run, but give it a try if it’s important to you.

[/quote]

And when everyone simply goes to the bathroom to take pills— particularly the nefarious ones-- what are you going to do about that?

Nothing, because you can't. Don't like it? Clutch your pearls a little harder.[/quote]

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