This is a sticky story that gets me a little fired up. It’s about accommodating for someone’s special situation, such as a disability, and it seems to me it’s getting out of control. A Hamilton mom is proving it with her human rights complaint.
Lynne Glover says her child’s school is discriminating against her 6-year-old daughter, Elodie, because it won’t ban dairy and eggs. Elodie has severe allergies to those products which, as you know, are numerous. Lynne complains that Elodie has to sit by herself during snack time and that the school only serves milk in tetra-paks to reduce the risk. She believes all such products should be banned completely to protect her daughter.
Our nephew has a severe allergy to peanuts. Schools ban peanuts routinely because that’s easy. It’s peanuts and peanut butter. And when my brother-in-law comes over for a visit he sometimes dives into our peanut butter jar with a spoon because he can’t have the stuff at home! If our nephew had to live with us for some reason, we would eliminate peanuts from the house. And we are always super careful about the ingredients of food we have around him.
I understand and support the endeavour to even out the playing field for people with disabilities. If someone is blind, you need to have braille or audio materials for them. If someone can’t hear, you need to supply them with visual material. But to expect all families involved in the school system to not send any cheese, yogurt, milk products or eggs to school seems unrealistic and unfair. Sorry lady, if your kid was in a wheelchair, she would have to watch the others run track. Would you have them stop running track because she felt bad? Perhaps this child should be home-schooled and that would keep her safe.
One of my college students worked hard on a bullying story this week that involved a boy with Autism Spectrum Disorder who is, many witnesses confirm, physically bullying two girls in his grade 7 class. The girls are missing school and the school refuses to intervene because the boy is differently-abled. In other words, the two girls are being left to endure getting picked on and abused to protect the boy’s rights. Their parents are frustrated. It’s awful. And my student’s story was quashed by threats from the public school because of the boy’s condition. The Autism group my student interviewed told her she must have the story backward, that it must be the boy who’s the victim. Our society loses objectivity over someone with a disability. Part of not discriminating against them seems to me to consider that they can behave badly, make poor choices and be jerks just like the rest of us.
It goes too far, I think, this desperate need to make everyone feel the same. What about the girls who are victims of the bully? What about the 24 other kids in the Hamilton classroom who can drink milk? I don’t know how one should handle these situations except to say that the rights of the girl with the allergies and the boy with Autism should not supersede the rights of the others. That seems to me to be just another form of discrimination.