South Jersey Parents Fighting To Allow Child's Treatment Be Given To Her At School
By Natasha Brown
MAPLE SHADE, N.J., (CBS) --Sixteen-year-old Genny Barbour is severely autistic and suffers from epilepsy. In this moment she's calm, laughing, playing with her 12-year-old sister.
Roger and Lora Barbour say this is a far cry from the violent seizures that had been interrupting her life almost daily.
"For 16 years she's been on every medicine they have, brain surgery, special diets. Never stopped a single seizure," said father Roger Barbour.
Exhausting every option the Barbours resorted to medicinal marijuana for their daughter.
Genny began consuming the homemade cannabis oil three times a day, less than a teaspoon mixed with soda.
The Barbours say it's been a life changing concoction.
"Five months on medical marijuana her seizures are 80 percent less, her clarity, look into her eyes, there's Genny," said Roger Barbour.
The initial three doses a day began wearing off, so doctors suggested a fourth dose at lunchtime.
The problem, the Larc School which serves children with disabilities and the Maple Shade School District wouldn't allow Lora or anyone at the school to give Genny the oil on school grounds.
The Barbours appealed the school's denial but a judge ruled in the district's favor, saying the district would be violating drug free school zone laws and federal law that still sees marijuana as a dangerous drug.
Just recently the Barbours say the school district's attorneys offered a compromise allowing his wife to take Genny out of school and off campus to administer the medical marijuana oil. It's an offer they refused.
"She's got a transitioning problem, she can't just change from place to place and everything's hunky-dory. If she got into mommy mobile and went off campus, she's thinking she's going home," said Roger Barbour.
The Barbours are settling in for a lengthy legal battle.
"This one dose is the entire basis of the lawsuit. This one dose here is what she needs at school," said Barbour.
They say their 16-year-old daughter's quality of life depends on it.
Right now the Barbours are only sending their daughter to school through noontime so that they can take her home to receive the medical marijuana oil dosage.
Meantime CBS 3 Eyewitness News did reach out to the attorney for the Maple Shade School District, he had no comment.
