Kids and Health Care: Clashing Political Agendas
Diet and nutrition aren't the only places that the school bureaucracy can fail kids. The conflicting political agendas of teachers, administrators and parents often make important matters "dead issues" that can't be discussed rationally. As a result, public health and security policies in public schools sometimes end up tripping over basic medical needs of individual kids.
Iowa public schools experienced exactly this sort of problem in the early 2000s, when they banned asthma inhalers from school grounds as part of an ill-conceived "zero tolerance" policy to drugs at school. Pretty quickly, parent groups complained that the school policy actually put kids who suffered from asthma at risk for serious attacks -- if they tried to bring their medicine inhalers to school (the devices were often confiscated by administrators).
In the spring of 2004, a group of state legislators drafted a bill that would require Iowa schools to allow students to carry and take their asthma or breathing medication with a parent's written approval -- and as long as a school liability waiver was also signed by the student's parent or guardian.
The same public health advocates who'd championed the "zero tolerance" policy quickly realized that the asthma inhaler ban had gone too far. They agreed with the new bill, admitting that allowing kids to carry their medicine would encourage "acceptance of adult responsibility." That public policy aim was well and good -- but the real point was to help asthmatics breathe.
Public health remains a mixed-bag of government efforts and results.
In California, some counties used settlement money from the state's lawsuit against tobacco manufacturers to develop what they called Perinatal Outreach and Education (POE) programs. The programs were instituted to enhance the health of Los Angeles county infants and their mothers and to lower several barriers to health care, including barriers to:
- prenatal care among low-income pregnant women;
- health care insurance coverage among low-income women and their children;
- health education among low-income women; and
- care coordination/case management among pregnant and post-partum women and female adolescents.
That last item caused some controversy.
In some cases, POE staffers worked with school health care providers to deliver child-bearing information to junior high- and high school-aged girls. While the intent may have been good, the effect -- lessons on family planning, pregnancy nutrition, breastfeeding, etc. -- seemed to condone young, unmarried girls having children. If nothing else, these sorts of programs ignite political tensions that make the news...but don't do much for kids' health care.
