Hi, my name is Katherine and I am grade 12 student at Centre Wellington District High School. I just turned 18 years old on the 9th. In the past 16 months I have had 15 anaphylactic reactions, 13 of these reactions have happened at the High School. The trigger for these reactions? Fragrance. I have a severe Chemical Allergy to fragrance. The school is doing what it can to ban scents in school, but there’s only so much they can do. The school has made announcements, put up signs, and gone class to class explaining how these reactions affect me. The student body has had it explained to them that the reaction itself is dangerous, and that for me the after effects are even more so. I am also a Type 1 Diabetic, so each time I have an anaphylactic episode my blood sugars spike dangerously high and then rapidly drop to dangerously low levels for hours. Then due to other side effects of the Diabetes like ketones I end up sick for days afterwards. I have a swollen liver and painful kidneys from the reactions. Many students- once they were made aware- stopped wearing scented products to school. However there is a group of students who have decided to take a different approach. These students not only continue to wear perfumes, they spray their backpacks and lockers, re-spray themselves in the bathrooms where no camera can see them, and smash perfume bottles in the hallways and bathrooms. These students have been heard to say that they want to “drive me out of the school”, and when confronted, one girl said “I hope the girl with the allergy comes by and dies”. People are deliberately trying to kill me now, they all know how spraying things affects my health, and they don’t care. This is a horrid and especially cruel form of bullying. The majority of the High School population has had enough. We have decided to have a day where everyone who’s in support of not wearing scents to the school wears a mask in silent protest of the students who are trying to “drive me out or end my life”. The date we have chosen for our protest is Friday April 4th. We want as many people in the community as possible to be aware of the issue. We want a change, and we NEED it now. Is it possible to have something printed in the paper about this issue? I’d be very grateful for anything.
yours truly,
Katherine Wilson
Katherine Wilson