Black student suspended over his hairstyle to be sent to an alternative education program
Black student suspended over his hairstyle to be sent to an alternative education program
After serving more than a month of in-school suspension over his dreadlocks, a Black student in Texas was told he will be removed from his high school and sent to a disciplinary alternative education program on Thursday. Darryl George, 18, is a junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu and ...
After serving more than a month of in-school suspension over his dreadlocks, a Black student in Texas was told he will be removed from his high school and sent to a disciplinary alternative education program on Thursday.
Darryl George, 18, is a junior at Barbers Hill High School in Mont Belvieu and has been suspended since Aug. 31. He will be sent to EPIC, an alternative school program, from Oct. 12 through Nov. 29 for “failure to comply” with multiple campus and classroom regulations, the principal said in a Wednesday letter provided to The Associated Press by the family.
Principal Lance Murphy wrote that George has repeatedly violated the district's “previously communicated standards of student conduct." The letter also says that George will be allowed to return to regular classroom instruction on Nov. 30 but will not be allowed to return to his high school's campus until then unless he's there to discuss his conduct with school administrators.
Barbers Hill Independent School District prohibits male students from having hair extending below the eyebrows, ear lobes or top of a T-shirt collar, according to the student handbook. Additionally, hair on all students must be clean, well-groomed, geometrical and not an unnatural color or variation. The school does not require uniforms.
George's mother, Darresha George, and the family's attorney deny the teenager's hairstyle violates the dress code. The family last month filed a formal complaint with the Texas Education Agency and a federal civil rights lawsuit against the state’s governor and attorney general, alleging they failed to enforce a new law outlawing discrimination based on hairstyles.
The family alleges George's suspension and subsequent discipline violate the state’s CROWN Act, which took effect Sept. 1. The law, an acronym for “Create a Respectful and Open World for Natural Hair,” is intended to prohibit race-based hair discrimination and bars employers and schools from penalizing people because of hair texture or protective hairstyles including Afros, braids, dreadlocks, twists or Bantu knots.
A federal version passed in the U.S. House last year, but was not successful in the Senate.
The school district also filed a lawsuit in state district court asking a judge to clarify whether its dress code restrictions limiting student hair length for boys violates the CROWN Act. The lawsuit was filed in Chambers County, east of Houston.
George’s school previously clashed with two other Black male students over the dress code.
Barbers Hill officials told cousins De’Andre Arnold and Kaden Bradford they had to cut their dreadlocks in 2020. Their families sued the district in May 2020, and a federal judge later ruled the district’s hair policy was discriminatory. Their pending case helped spur Texas lawmakers to approve the state’s CROWN Act. Both students withdrew from the school, with Bradford returning after the judge’s ruling.
link: https://www.aol.com/news/black-student-suspended-over-hairstyle-220842177.html
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Can't imagine my school making international news, especially with something as pathetic. It reads like a bad Onion article. Barber High having a strict hair code? WTF. And this story goes for months, and it's not the first time, and it's real. How? Everything screams stupid fiction there, and yet that's what happens in a small town in Texas. Idk if they did that out of racism or boredom, but come on, I read about this comical idiocy from the opposite side of the globe. I can't imagine what's going through the mind of this school's admin.
Out of curiosity, how are the students and his peers taking it? Apathetic? Indifferent? Upset? Protesting?
I have been trying to get a better understanding of your generation as I am working with a lot of Gen Z right now. Sometimes I am frustrated when it comes to, at least to me, a lack of technological skills, but that isn't what I am really asking. I just wonder how things look socially.
You got my marbles spinning as I struggle to give a short answer. I'm not close to these people but I can extrapolate what I saw\read.
Those who do care probably feel upset, isolated and insecure. It's not a wake up call, but rather another spit in their faces.
The edition referenced there, Novaya Gazeta, is banned from russian infospace, so they are likely feel alone in knowing about it. Twitter, Facebook and Instagram where people were exposed to other povs and created communities, generated outrage about issues so it couldn't be ignored, aren't availiable without VPNs. These stories don't get visibility, people don't feel their opinion is represented. So they don't think like there would be someone to vouch for them if they get caught. It wears on people I know, especially if they had mental health issues before. It's insecurity that at an any random moment imbecile in power can right-click-delete you. Even if you did nothing at all. Like, being terminated for a protest as a male student may lead you right into conscription you avoided via eduxation because university tracks that and shares information immediately.
It doesn't really work 100%. This system is riddled with corruption. But after all undisscussed acts of fucking their country up, these people feel defensless, powerless, like in Kafka's Process where MC didn't even knew why he was prosecuted. They couldn't predict a sudden landing in Crimea, this active phase starting, mobilization, it has been done without them. They can only manage things on a local level.
And violence against others is now normalized: there were a lot of news of conveyor-like torture of prisoners that ended up being a meme – anal insertion of champaign bottles is in language of everyone. Killing of a 'traitor' with a slegdehammer by Wagner that was referenced in news and by gov. Kadyrov now showing he can export a russian Koran-burner to Chechnya and then play with him like with a doll, posting his beating and him saying sorry.
Even armed men from the frontlines who kill people and step over other lines of humanity record their shy requests to their general or president of more munition or a scheduled leave to post in Telegram. They do exactly what they told, they are not opposing anything, but they are in fear of being punished. It's XVIII century serfs writing to the tzar for their lord misbehaving and threating them too bad.
It's like an empire of fear and people are psychologically programmed to act that way. Even holding an opposite opinion, they are too conditioned by this crime state to not trust, to fear, to isolate. They won't cite any rights because they know that following the law depends on the mood of an official.
Hah, I had two threads about edu and I wrote you an answer about russian ones. I'm not the best person to tell you about texan schools, sorry.