To Whom It May Concern, November 16, 2009

We are writing as a group of students in a sociology class at Wartburg College. In this class, we are focusing on communities and our group is specifically working with the local schools. Our class goal is to increase public awareness of the detrimental effects of nut allergies and bring the political and educational front to advocate change to make school lunch programs safer for all children. We feel that this issue is of great importance because the number of children being born with nut allergies is increasing. This directly affects our community because there are children in this school district with nut allergies who may be exposed to nuts in their school hot lunch programs.

As a class, we decided to advocate for individuals with nut allergies because it is the most common cause of food related death in America. There are more than three million people in the United States who have nut allergies, a number that is dramatically increasing. Our goal is to encourage the Waverly-Shell Rock and Janesville schools to move to a nut-free hot lunch program. By doing this, children who are affected by nut allergies would be able to be more dependable on the school lunch program. Children and parents will still need to take precautions, as we are not asking that the entire school be nut-free. However, allowing children with nut allergies to rely on a nut-free hot lunch program will greatly increase their safety and greatly decrease parent’s concern.

Many people argue that children and parents need to be their own advocate and take on their own responsibility for their allergy. We strongly agree with the idea that children and parents need to have a good understanding of the condition and take precautions. However, we feel that it is unreasonable to put the health and safety in the hands of a young child. We feel that the school’s hot lunch programs should be responsible for providing a safe meal for each child with a nut allergy. This would require a nut-free hot lunch program to ensure that there is not any cross contamination.

We would appreciate your understanding and support for our cause. We will be holding an open forum at the Waverly Public Library on Monday, November 16th. At 6:30pm we will provide nut-free food samples in the ICN room and at 7:00pm the open forum will begin in the Bremer room. We invite you to attend this forum to discuss our goals and progress. In the mean time, if you have any questions, comments, or concerns feel free to contact us through our professor, Jessica Herrmeyer, whose email is jessica.herrmeyer@wartburg.edu and telephone number is 319-352-8389. You may also visit our blog online at www.nutfreehotlunch.blogspot.com. Thank you for your time and understanding.

Best regards,
Education Group
Communities Class
Wartburg College

The Forum is almost here!

Hi Everyone!

Our class has been busy working on the forum. Jobs have been given out and everyone is doing their part to make it a success. We want to educate the public about the realities of nut allergies.

Those letters made it out to the community. The school group also passed out invites to our forum last week in all the schools in Waverly, Shell Rock, and Janesville. We are hoping for a big turn out! We also presented on our online networks. Those were neat and interesting!

Again, the Open Forum is on Monday, November 16, 2009, at the Waverly Public Library. The library is on West Bremer Avenue. We will start with nut-free samples at 6:30pm and the presentation will start at 7:00pm. We hope to see everyone there!

Thanks for your support!

It's getting closer...

We are starting to organize our forum. Today in class we handed out jobs for each class member. We decided what nut-free samples we are providing. We will have the petition there for community members to attend. We also finalized our letters that we are sending out. We presented them in class today and need Prof. Herrmeyer to ok them before they are sent.

Please feel free to give comments and suggestions! We are more thant willing to listen and take them into consideration.

This Week...

I hope everyone is doing well!

Just wanted to fill you in on what has been happening. We have all been busy working on the letters that we are going to send to schools, political offices, and community businesses asking for help/support in our cause. We will be sending those out next week some time. We are also monitoring our social networks. The class has been busy handing out flyers for our forum which again is November 19, 2009, at the Waverly Public Library starting at 6:30pm with some nut-free food samples.

Please tell all that you know about this so we can answer people's questions and inform them of this cause. Also, please, please, pleas let us know if you have any suggestions or comments for us.

Thanks for your support!

Update

Some of the school group went to the Waverly-Shell Rock School Board meeting last night. We went to tell the board about what we are doing and why. We shared our petition and information about the forum that will be on Monday, November 16, 2009 at the Waverly Public Library from 6:30pm to 8pm.

If you have a Facebook account, join the group Nut Allergy Awareness. It gives a description of our class project and what we are doing.
We also have a page on MySpace. myspace.com/nutfreeamigos You can go to the website and also leave us suggestions.

Please feel free to comment and give us ideas or what you would like to see done.

We created a blog on peanutallergy.com so feel free to learn more from that site as well. To get to that site, click on the link below.

www.peanutallergy.com/boards/

Then once on that page, scroll down to where it says "General Discussion". Then continue to scroll down until you find "Peanut Free Businesses". Click on that. Then look for the creater "Wartburg Communities Class". There you can read our updated blog.

Thanks!

What we have been up to...

Our class is meeting again tomorrow to share our group online networking. We have a page on Facebook and MySpace as well. The school group (the creators of this blog) also started a similar blog on peanutallergy.com to see if we could get more people's attention.

Class was busy and productive on Tuesday. Our class started outlines for letters that we are sending out in the middle of October to different groups. We want to share share our concerns and goals wth them and to see if they will help/cooperate with us. Some of us also went out into the community to see how community members felt about what we were doing and to see what they know about nut allegies. We are also in the process of finalizing our forum that will take place at the Waverly Public Library, date and time to be announced soon. The class is working on getting flyers ready to give to community members at a later date.

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, comments, concerns, please let us know. We are open to ideas and what others are feeling on this subject.

Thank you so much!