Insulin Pump Problems for Gainesville (FL) High School Student
Becky found this really interesting article about a girl who attends Gainesville (FL) High School and continues to have problems with teachers trying to take away her insulin pump.
Olivia’s father, Steve Drago, was already upset about the questioning when he heard about the Lake County incident. Then Olivia came home and told him an administrator had tapped on her pump with a Walkie Talkie, thinking it was a pager,…
Having attended another Alachua County school (Buchholz), I can tell you just how easily I can picture that confrontation. All I have to do is slightly shrink the size of the walkie-talkie (although for some reason I imagine they still use larger ones to emphasize their authority) and suddenly I am back in high school. I hate to turn this into an article about school administrators abusing their power and being clueless but that’s essentially my point here.
The article also references similar problems experienced by other students in nearby schools.
In Lake County earlier this month, the crackdown became dangerous for an East Ridge High School student whose substitute teacher ripped an insulin pump from his body, thinking it was a beeping cellular phone. The beeping actually was an alert that the student’s sugar levels were low, and the teacher was fired within days of the incident.
As a parent of a child with an insulin pump and as a parent who has made some significant sacrifices and changes to obtain said pump this scenario makes me very angry.
In another instance in 2002, a student in a Boca Raton suburb had to hand her pump over to Eagles Landing Middle School’s assistant principal, who thought it was a pager. The middle-schooler’s parents later sued and won $10,000 from the assistant principal. Their settlement also called for better diabetes training for the school district’s staff.
Too bad the attorney probably got all of that money. Why is it when a company does something wrong, the courts have no trouble punishing them into oblivion but when our government screws up we hand out little slap on the wrist things? It’s not that I am in favor of big judgements necessarily — I’m just pointing out the discrepency.
I think the root of the whole problem is wrapped up in three points: 1 — Lack of knowledge by school staff about diabetes (always seems to come up), 2 — On going battle over technology and items at schools, and 3 — Over zealous school authorities who enjoy exercising their control over students.
Point 1 (diabetes education) is an obvious item. The ADA screams about this all the time and it never really happens or the people who get trained forget all about it after their 1 hour seminar on it. I honestly think the best thing to do is do what Olivia in the story here is doing and that is continuing to not hide the fact that she’s diabetic and wear’s a pump. It’s hard for her but it forces the issue. It let’s people know. I have no disrespect for people who are discrete about their diabetes but we’ll continue to not hide checking Grayson’s sugar in public (which in our case involves using his pump). As he gets older, Grayson can decide how discrete or open he wants to be about it but I don’t want to be ashamed about it or feel like he has to hide it. It’s a horrible thing and yet it’s a special gift and challenge that God has given him (and us) to deal with.
The technology issue is a little more complicated. Schools are horribly high pressure when it comes to social interaction, problems, and other issues. So it’s no surprise that schools are down students having cell phones and pagers. When I was in school, the bans handed down changed over the school year as different things became popular: various sorts of candy, toothpicks, hats, walkmen, etc… it just flowed and often repeated. Personally, I don’t have a problem with kids having cell phones (especially girls) at even the late elementary or middle school age. Obviously rules need to be instituted about their use and display (and I think that’s generally what’s going on here). But the biggest issue is disrupting class. I would think that you’d just have hard core (teacher-by-teacher) rules about disturbing class and you’d go from there. Walking around tapping people’s electronic devices with your walkie antenna is kind of over the top.
And that brings me to the 3rd point which is that some school administrators seem to take a fair amount of joy from ordering students around. I think anyone who has ever attended school, can think of examples of school administrators or teachers who seemed to take the discipline side too seriously. I have a friend who was a cop and he said to really enjoy being a cop he felt you needed to enjoy ordering people around. I think there are some people in the school systems who may have missed their true calling and ended up in a school instead of sitting in a car in a rural speedtrap somewhere.
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