Ministry Lacks Allergy Data as Supreme Court Hears School Medical Aides Petition
The Ministry of Education admitted in the Supreme Court that it lacks data on allergic children as it implements a controversial pilot program replacing classroom medical aides with school nurses.
The Ministry of Education admitted during a High Court hearing on Monday that it lacks concrete data regarding the number of allergic children in the education system, the frequency of allergic reactions in schools, and the number of emergency evacuations resulting from them.
The Petition Against the Pilot Program
The hearing was held in response to a petition filed by attorney Gilad Bar Tal, legal counsel for the Yahal Association. The petition challenges what parents and the association describe as an experimental pilot program. The Ministry of Education is seeking to remove medical aides from first and second-grade classrooms, replacing them with a school nurse model. This pilot was already launched at the start of the current school year across 10 schools.
According to the petitioners, the ministry is pushing forward with the new model despite the total absence of baseline data, raising serious concerns regarding real-time responses to allergic episodes.
"We do not live on statistics, but deal with reality," the association stated after the hearing. "Our children are not a budget line, and their lives are not an experiment."
Safety and Research Concerns
During the proceedings, attorney Bar Tal questioned how educational staff are expected to handle sudden severe reactions, how quickly a nurse could be summoned, and the exact response time for emergency care. Petitioners also revealed that while the state portrays the pilot as a professionally researched initiative, no such research has actually begun yet. A tender to select an academic institution to conduct the study is only now underway.
Furthermore, the association criticized the stance of the Association of Allergologists, arguing it fails to account for the severe psychological and emotional toll that life-threatening allergies inflict on young children. Parents stress that safety cannot be measured solely by tracking mortality or extreme medical emergencies.
