Managing Classroom Allergies

Hi everyone.

I teach 3rd grade and I've been looking for some kind of way to keep track of my student's allergies, specifically food allergies. Has anybody found a good solution to this?

 

Hello! I actually found a great tool for managing the allergies in my classroom, it is called Friendly Reminders - MyFriendlyReminders[dot]com . I don't think it was originally created for this but it works very well. All you have to do is send out a link to all the parents and it automatically gets added to a group.

 

As if this isn't slightly suspicious......

I use a spreadsheet. Done.

 

I am very fortunate -- our gradebook program (RenWeb) sends a reminder every single time you log on for anything saying "ALERT!" and then lists the names of the students, what their food allergies are, where their epi-pens or other medicines are located (in a locked cabinet), etc. You can't take roll, send a classwide email or anything related to that without reading it. You can believe after seeing these messages pop-up daily all year long, I don't forget!

I had 5 students last year with severe allergies (tree nuts, peanuts, and milk & milk products.) That list kept me straight.

 

All children with allergies are tagged within my grading program before I even meet them. However, the school nurse is also a great resource for information like this.

 

Wow that's awesome! I wish we had that.

 

I'm currently using a spreadsheet right now. I am just a little lazy and was hoping I could find someway to offload this information to somebody else.

The problem with the nurse is, she's so busy all the time.

I think Oliver's suggestion is more along the track I was looking for. It doesn't look like this Friendly Reminders thing was designed for teachers directly but I can get it to work. The cool part is that the parents do the heavy lifting, and I don't have to manage the spreadsheet.

I like how the reports look too.

 

Our nurse creates a list of students with food allergies for the whole school that we get a copy of. Even if I don't teach the student, I might one day be subbing in the class, so we need to know.

 

We use power school and under the student information tab it shows all of the students who have any medical alerts and if they are taking medication at school. I use that to make a table students and alerts.