Yet another Zero Tolerance Stupidity

Wow this one blows my friggin mind!

Kamryn decided to have a big makeover — shaving off all of her hair in solidarity with a friend who was starting chemotherapy to treat cancer.

“I was really excited I would have somebody to support me and I wouldn’t be alone with people always laughing at me. I would at least have somebody to go through it all,” says Delaney, who just began chemotherapy.

…Game, set, match, right? Time to cave! Nope: Kamryn was forced to spend Monday on the playground instead of in class because school rules ban shaved heads in the name of “safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students.” Then, after a wholly predictable firestorm online yesterday, the school finally did cave (turns out there are exceptions to the dress code in “extraordinary circumstances”) and let her back in today. The school’s board of directors is meeting within the next hour or two to decide the important question of whether classroom decorum can survive having two bald girls in class instead of one. How will this completely unnecessary publicity trainwreck end? The suspense mounts, my friends.

First up, shaved heads banned for dress code? Back when I was in elementary school the classic buzz cut was the cool fashion. I suspect it was so “Cool” was because a little boy with his hair trimmed down to the scalp was less work for parents keeping their kids clean and delivering them to school in presentable conditions. Some kids buzz cuts were so extreme that it was practically a shaved head. Heck it was how my head looked back when I used to shave my scalp (but not my face) after I put down the clippers and before I picked up the razor.

Sorry the only distraction was kids rubbing your scalp during recess, nobody cared in class, there were far more distracting things about!

I’m sure there are vastly more disruptive aspects to having a kid fighting cancer in class than just her lack of hair, and another girl with no hair can’t be THAT big of a deal.

And then there’s the bigger aspect. A kid fighting cancer is going to have a ROUGH time keeping up with classwork. I know of kids who had to repeat grades because of medical issues, and my own wife’s grades took a nose dive when her epilepsy first reared its head and she was battling the side-effects of the different medications she was trying.

Having a friend like this is NOTHING but good for her, and I really can’t see the harm to anybody else. Maybe the first day she shows up with her shaved head it might distract a bit, and the teacher would be right to point out what’s going on. You know, to TEACH the kids about life and being good humans! But after the first day or so nobody is going to give it a second glance!

Good LORD, we trust these morons with our kids?

This entry was posted in Biology, Epilepsy, Politics. Bookmark the permalink.

3 Responses to Yet another Zero Tolerance Stupidity

  1. bluesun says:

    They backed down, at least in this instance.

    https://deadmandance.wordpress.com/2014/03/26/all-you-guys-talking-about-zero-tolerance-rules-can-feel-better-now/

    Something about being made fun of from around the country.

  2. Motor-T says:

    Zero tolerance policies assume that teachers and administrators are imbeciles.

    When those teachers and administrators follow those policies they prove that assumption to be correct.

  3. Wolfman says:

    I suspect this is a skin-head thing; or at the least, its a homogeneity thing, so all the kids maintain a certain variation of exactly the same. The first is dumb- the reasoning being, if the kids can’t shave their head, they won’t develope National Socialist tendencies? The second is just lazy psychology- if they all look the same, we can expect them to all act the same. Either way, they took a situation where a kid did a good thing, and punished in the name of malum prohibitum. I’m glad they folded, here, but it won’t change it for all the kids in similar situations that didn’t get national attention.

Leave a Reply to Motor-T Cancel reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *