Health, Safety & the Environment

Greenwich Times reported on 5/23/09 that parents of students at Western Middle School in Greenwich become enraged when school officials recommended cancelling the eighth grade field trip to Washington D.C., a traditional rite of passage at Greenwich middle schools.  School officials were acting on the recommendation of local and state health officials, and an independent health expert, who expressed concern about the spread of swine flu virus on the trip after a sixth grade student was diagnosed with the illness.  The view expressed by  some parents was that if their kids were going to be around other children anyway, better to exposed to flu gaping at our nation’s historic monuments. One mom said, “If you keep school open, you have kids [who may have been infected] sharing the same cafeteria, the same music room, the same gymnasium, so they’re much more likely to get sick. They’d be better off getting them out to Washington, D.C.”  What can these parents be thinking?   The Greenwich teachers who accompany the children to Washington,  D.C. should not be forced into the position of medical caretakers in the event that children were to become ill on the trip.  Having one, let alone several, children suffering from flu in a D.C. hotel (where the kids on these trips are bunked several to a room dorm style) places teachers in the  untenable position of dealing with a contingency for which they were not trained and  should not be required to suffer through.  If a child becomes sick at school, he or she can be taken care of at home.  If a child develops flu in D.C., the options are very different.  In this morning’s Time, a parent was justifiably upset at the loss of the several hundred dollars he had laid out for his child’s trip.  However regrettable this financial loss, the Town has acted responsibly and correctly.  Forget the legal liability issue.  It’s about personal responsibility!  As members of the Greenwich community, we all have an obligation to think about how our actions potentially affect others and to act accordingly.  Earlier in the week,  school officials  were informed too late that a student tested positive for an unknown strain of flu (which turned out to be swine flu) had been permitted by his parents to join classmates on a sixth-grade field trip.  Unfortunately, neither the child’s physician nor parents informed the school that the boy was ill.   I am sure that the sixth grader in question pleaded with his parents to be permitted to attend the field trip (or maybe the field trip took place on the au pair’s day off), but in these situations personal responsibility demands that we all think about how our actions can influence others.  The child should have stayed home from school and the school should have been alerted.  Greenwich is a wonderful community. It would be an even more wonderful community if we all supported our school officials when they have to make their most painful  decisions on health and safety issues and if we, as parents, recognized that we have duties and obligations as citizens that we can’t ignore….ever!