Principal Who Doesn’t Like Student’s Haircut ‘Fixes’ It With A Black Marker
Pop quiz! You’re a school administrator who finds a student’s hairstyle (buzzed sides with a single line shaved from the temples to the back of the head) may be in violation of your school’s dress code. Do you:
A.) Call the student’s parent to discuss it and work out a suitable compromise?
B.) Send the student home or assign after-school detention until he returns with a dress-code-compliant ‘do?
C.) Realize there are bigger problems in the world than a haircut you don’t like, modernize the dress code a little, and get on with your day as usual?
D.) Color in the shaved line on his head with a black marker?
If you answered “D”, congratulations! You are probably gainfully employed as the assistant principal of a high school in Plainview, Texas. Bad news, though: you are also a jerk.
ABC7 News spoke with Plainview parent Monica Esquivel about her son Kobi‘s experience of being turned into a human coloring book by the assistant principal. Apparently, the school’s dress code forbids having ‘designs’ shaved into one’s hair. And while I am all about forbidding kids to have, say, the Texas Longhorns logo, or–God forbid–a Dallas Cowboys star shaved into the back of their head, I’m having a hard time construing a single line on the border between long hair and short as a “design”.
Esquivel also added that administrators told her her son’s hairstyle could be considered ‘gang-related‘, which makes me wonder what kind of gangs they have in Plainview. Sign my kids up for the “clean-cut likes-to-wear-khakis” gang please! Besides, if the administration is worried that gang signs, which is apparently what the Justin Bieber haircut is now, are too distracting to students, what’s their position on haircuts à la Crayola marker? (The principal better not have added insult to injury by using a crappy RoseArt marker, either.)
Whether or not the haircut violated the letter or the spirit of the school’s dress code, though, the assistant principal definitely stepped over a line when he decided to color in a black stripe on the young man’s head. There are ways to handle kids who are breaking school rules that do not involve violating those kids’ bodily autonomy, or humiliating them in front of their peers. Or inflicting marker fumes on the rest of their school day–I dare you to try to do algebra while huffing that stuff all morning. Kids are people too, and haircuts are just haircuts. If you want to work in a school, try to keep that in mind.
(Images: ABC7 News)
