1

AP PHOTO

The Frontier Regional and Union 38 School District is moving to establish a complete ban on peanut and tree nut products at its five schools, in a move administrators say is aimed at preventing student exposure to potential life threatening allergies.

DEERFIELD - Peanut butter and jelly sandwiches will be a thing of the past for students at the Frontier Regional and Union 38 School District this year. Or at least the peanut butter will be.

The district is moving to establish a complete ban on peanut and tree nut products at its five schools, in a move administrators say is aimed at preventing student exposure to potential life threatening allergies. The items the school is looking to ban include peanut butter, any product with peanut oil as an ingredient, any product with peanuts of any kind as an ingredient and tree nuts, such as almonds or walnuts.

"Parents will be disappointed they can't send (a peanut butter sandwich), but it is a life-and-death matter and we are not going to be flexible with this," said Louise Law, interim principal at Deerfield Elementary. "To me it's simple - it's about keeping children safe. That's my first job. If we can't keep them safe, we can't educate them.

Frontier is not alone in establishing what administrators call a "nut safe" policy. Nationally, a growing number of school districts are implementing such measures as a means of keeping their students safe from food allergies. In the Valley, William E. Norris Elementary School in Southampton implemented a nut safe policy in 2006 while Westhampton Elementary School is currently considering a similar plan. Hampshire Regional High School now has a peanut-free zone in the cafeteria and does not serve peanut or tree nut products.

Sam Nugen, an assistant professor of food science at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, said researchers are unsure why the number of individuals with potentially lethal food allergies is growing.

"One reason that it seems to be more prevalent is that it is being diagnosed more, with all of the attention it has been receiving, although that does not account for all of the increase," Nugen said.

Individuals are not allergic to the peanuts themselves, but proteins that occur naturally in the nuts, Nugen said. Some individuals might be allergic to one of the nut's proteins, but not another, while for someone else the reverse could be true, he said.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture is currently studying how to confront the growing number of food allergies from the standpoint of food processors, Nugen said. The agency is working to develop a strategy to combat a growing number of people who are allergic to eggs, fish, milk, peanuts, tree nuts, shellfish and soy, he said. Private companies are taking note as well and are increasingly prone to advertise "school safe" products that do not contain peanut products, Nugen said.

The UMass professor said he supported the ban on peanut products from schools as a short-term solution. Better, he argues, that a remedy in the food processing system be identified to combat the issue.

"For people who don't have these severe allergies, they tend to see (peanut bans) as overreacting," Nugen said. "The number of people who would go into anaphylactic shock is very small, but for those people who are susceptible it could be lethal, even with a small amount of exposure."

At Hampshire Regional High School, a number of tables in the cafeteria have been identified as a nut-free zone, said Superintendent Craig Jurgensen. He said the tables are washed multiple times daily to prevent students with allergies from coming into contact with peanut products. Westhampton, another school in his district, is looking to establish a nut-safe policy prior to the start of the school year, Jurgensen said.

"We're doing it as we find kids with those allergies, school by school," Jurgensen said. The district comprises the towns of Chesterfield, Goshen, Southampton, Westhampton and Williamsburg.

Bill Collins, principal at William E. Norris, acknowledged that the nut-safe policy was controversial when it was implemented at his school four years ago. However, he said he felt the ban was necessary and had proven successful in keeping students safe. No serious reactions have occurred since the ban went into place, he said.

"The children accepted it right away and the staff accepted it right away. It took a little longer for some of the parents and maybe some still struggle with it," Collins said. "The children have an innate sense of justice and what is fair. Now the children will say to a parent when they are making lunch, 'Dad I can't bring that (to school).'"

Collins said he has received a number of calls from area school administrators inquiring about his school's nut-safe policy.

Law, the Deerfield principal, said that in the past her school has seen the number of impacted students grow from a few individuals in select classes to students in nearly every grade of the school. Deerfield also has students with the most severe and rare form of peanut allergies, Law said, in which the affected person can have an allergic reaction just by sitting next to someone who is eating a peanut butter sandwich, for instance. The individual with the allergy can inhale the fumes from peanut butter and potentially have a life-threatening reaction, she said.

Mere contact with a peanut product can be similarly problematic, she said. For instance, a student who touches a keyboard previously used by a person who had touched a granola bar could have a serious skin reaction, she said.

Regina Nash, Frontier Regional and Union 38 superintendant, said she would be making a proposal to install a nut-safe policy at each of the district's five schools: Frontier Regional High School and Middle School, Conway Grammar School, Deerfield Elementary, Sunderland Elementary and Whately Elementary. The school committees for each of those schools will discuss the bans in September and vote on them in October, Nash said.

The Deerfield School Committee is slated to meet this Wednesday at 7 p.m. at the elementary school to discuss the issue.

"We are not looking to penalize anyone; we are looking to make sure our schools are safe for everyone," Nash said. "We have a minority of students who have an allergy and we just want to make sure that they, too, have a safe learning environment."