Peanut butter jam: should peanut butter be kicked out of school?

(Excerpted from WR News, Edition 3, Oct 10, 2008 v78 i6 p3 [2], available in Kids InfoBits, a Gale online resource that includes ReadSpeaker text-to-speech technology. Full-text ©2008 Weekly Reader Corp.)

When Sam Roffwarg was 18 months old, someone on an airplane gave him a snack pack of peanuts. Sam ate a few of the nuts. Suddenly, he was throwing up and gasping for air because he couldn't breathe.

It turned out that Sam, now 8, has a peanut allergy. An allergy is a bad reaction to something. Today, the third grader from Jackson, Miss., is careful about what he eats. "I always read the ingredients," Sam told WR News. "My mom has trained me."

Staying away from peanuts is hard when Sam goes to school, though. When other kids eat peanut butter, Sam has to be sure not to sit near them. Just touching a peanut could make him sick. A severe, or strong, allergic reaction could be life threatening.

To protect kids, some schools are limiting or banning peanuts. A survey of about 1,200 school districts found that 18 percent of schools had some type of peanut ban in 2007.

Some officials say the bans are needed to protect kids with allergies. About 400,000 school-age children have peanut allergies, and experts say that number is growing.

Still, most kids are not allergic to peanuts. Some people say banning peanuts is not fair. Plus, they say, keeping track of what every kid eats is impossible. "You just can't monitor what's in every person's lunch pail," says Janet Mitchell, a school district representative in Georgia.