This is just political correctness going overboard. Granted I was 7 years old in the early 1970’s but at that time in my elementary school, about half of all the boys sported haircuts like this kid.
Summary:
7 year old sports a high and tight buzz cut in support of his older brother who is in the military
Kid’s parents are told by the school principal that the haircut is distracting like a mohawk and is a violation of the dress/conduct code and that it must be shaved.
Parents complain but comply
I would argue that a shaven head on a 7 year old is more distracting than a buzz cut.
That’s an interesting use of “political correctness”: I guarandamntee you it’s not a liberal who’s telling a boy he’s got to get a haircut. But honestly, much as I went into this story expecting there to be more to it than first blush, it really does sound like the principal is being a fool.
I’ve got kids coming to school with mohawks, dreads, neon dye jobs, and nobody gives a crap. It’s offensively stupid to suspend a kid for their haircut, barring something like a pot leaf or an obscenity shaved into their skull.
The other ironic touch to the OP’s story, as the linked article notes… the school is named for a local Vietnam era Naval corpsman who was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for (among other things) throwing himself on wounded Marine to save him from a grenade.
Military haircut not allowed in school named for a heroic member of the military. Sheesh.
I absolutely do not understand why hair always seems to be a hot-button issue. When I was in school, there was much hue and cry about about boys looking like girls with their Beatle haircuts. My mother gave me unending grief because I wanted to wear mine long, straight, and parted in the middle as was the style.
Even today, my youngest sister (who will be 50 next month) periodically changes her hair color - in the past year it’s been hot pink, lime green, bright yellow, bright red, and even multi-colored, much to our mother’s chagrin.
So what? It’s hair. It will grow.
If you work around machinery or food, you need to keep it contained. If you have a job in uniform, military or otherwise, suck it up and comply with the uniform regs. Beyond that, it’s just hair. People who are upset or offended by something so inconsequential need to do some deep introspection, as far as I’m concerned.
A high and tight isn’t supposed to be completely bald on the sides and back; there’s suppose to be, I guess, “stubble.” My husband, who served in Iraq in 2005, still wears his hair this way, and our son likes to have his hair “like Dad’s,” so he gets high and tights in the summer, although it has nothing to do with school, it has to do with keeping his head warm, and he usually gets his first one in April, though, this year he just got it last week to celebrate a break in the really cold weather we’d had in February and March.
If this boy’s head was really shaved bald on the sides, then he got a bad haircut, and was more to be pitied than censured.
Also, making him shave it bald is ridiculous, but again, there still may be more to the story. Maybe some kid who came in with a genuine Sex Pistols Mohawk last year and was told to get rid of it or face suspension complained when he saw Army boy and whined that “If I can’t have a Mohawk, why can he?” so now any cut with bare sides is out.
I understand the school’s point that odd hair is distracting, but if they ignored it all, eventually it wouldn’t be. They can legitimately ban things like spiked Mohawks or beehives, that can block someone’s vision, but they need to publish a dress code handbook with illustrations of permitted hairstyles, and until then, they really shouldn’t be able to come after someone ex post facto with a vague “it’s distracting.”
There’s a long tradition in our country of liberals NOT being the ones that say, “Get a haircut!” It’s kind of a cultural marker that liberals don’t do that.
I’ve never heard of a single case of a liberal principal requiring a kid to get a haircut.
The school, as others have pointed out, is named after a soldier. It’s got about the most southern-soldier name imaginable. Even if a military-hating communist got hired as principal there, I find it extraordinarily unlikely he’d let his freak flag fly.
Especially since academians in general tend toward liberal politics and, even though Ohio is a swing state, Dayton is in a squarely blue county. Seems like the statistical odds are against that assumption.
If he wanted to look like a rock star it would be one thing, but what could a seven year old go through that would be more military then for an absolute authoritarian figure to give him a buzz cut?
Seems like the kid is more interested in the style then the substance.
As a Tennessean less than an hour away, I have a hard time imagining there are any died in the wool liberals in McMinnville, a city of 13,000 that even the people in my stereotypically right wing town of 50k think is full of hicks.
It looks more like a mohawk than a “high and tight” to me, but it shouldn’t matter.
My son did have a mohawk at that age and sports dyed hair as a teen. It honestly would never occur to me that there are “acceptable” hairstyles for attending school.
Other than not wearing short shorts or hats on regular school days, I can’t really think of any other prohibited school fashions.
Ok, more seriously now… The school dress code is given to the parents in the student handbook every year and this school does not allow mohawk style haircuts… Um… Shouldn’t that really be the end of the story right there?
I’ll keep going anyway.
The kid showed up with this haircut a couple weeks ago and the principal sent a letter home. The mother sent him back the next day with the same haircut so the principal emailed her and she went by for a chat where, according to the mother, “it was made clear that Adam’s hairstyle would have to change before he returned to school.” So, her snowflake isn’t getting a free pass because his hair loves America more than other kids’ hair does.
She then took him home, shaved his head and contacted the news talking about how “with no hair, he looks sick all the time” and demanding a public apology not only to her son, but for fallen war heroes and everyone in the military. Oh pu-leeze.
My opinion is that rules about hair are dumb but them’s the rules. The mom either didn’t read the rules or thought her boy was special so she broke them and painted herself in the corner with only one solution. Then instead of saying ‘Sorry son, we have to cut a little bit more hair off, but it’ll be cool, you’ll look even tougher!’ she called the paper and said ‘Look at my son, he looks like shit, why do they hate America?!?!’
Now the school, named for a war hero and with a gym named for a 20 year old local resident who died in Afghanistan (and, I assume, was an alumni of the school), has had to take down their facebook page and increase security because everyone thinks they’re ISIS or something.
“Back in the day”, it seemed to me that society was getting more and more liberal and “loose”. Now, forty-some years later I’m seeing stuff like this, or hearing about dress codes in schools today that my classmates in high-school would have been violating.
Can’t these authorities look at fashions, and recognize that 1970s high school graduates did not cause the downfall of western civilization by girls wearing very short cut-offs and halters (somehow they managed to fit into office culture a few years later) and guys wearing long hair, jeans, t-shirts and construction boots (like me) who similarly fit into the working world. And when they look at this, can’t they see their own hypocricy?
Instead of becoming more conservative as I get older, I seem to be getting much more tolerant. I don’t get it.
