Posted on 11/27/2013 1:24:25 AM PST by grundle
A 12-year-old girl will be expelled from a Florida school unless she gets her hair under control, school officials have told her. Vanessa VanDyke, an honors student and violinist at the Faith Christian Academy in Orlando, tells WKMG that administrators have given her one week to decide whether to cut and shape her hair or leave the school, which she has attended since the third grade.
Faith Christian Academy did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Yahoo Shine. And VanDyke’s mother, Sabrina Kent, could not be reached for comment.
But WKMG reports that the school’s handbook includes a section on hair that says it “must be a natural color and must not be a distraction,” stating examples that include mohawks, shaved designs and rat tails. However, notes Kent, “A distraction to one person is not a distraction to another. You can have a kid come in with pimples on his face. Are you going to call that a distraction?"
VanDyke wears her hair in a natural African-American style, which she says she won’t change. “It says that I'm unique,” she tells WKMG. “First of all, it's puffy and I like it that way. I know people will tease me about it because it’s not straight. I don’t fit in.”
She notes that fellow students have recently been teasing her about her hairstyle and it has only become an issue with the school since her family logged complaints about those incidents. Still, if the Faith Christian Academy administrators won’t reverse course, VanDyke says she will go to school elsewhere. “I’m depressed about leaving my friends and people that I’ve known for a while, but I'd rather have that than the principals and administrators picking on me and saying that I should change my hair,” she explains.
(Excerpt) Read more at shine.yahoo.com ...
There were kids in my high school back in the 80s with hair like that. Several of them. No problems reported.
It would be one thing if her hair were bright pink, or shaped into 6” spikes. Threatening her over that hairstyle is beyond intolerant. Were I the parent, I’d inform the school that I expected to see every girl there cut their hair short as well, or they’d be hearing from a lawyer. Just because her hair doesn’t lay utterly flat (i.e. like a caucasian or asian’s would) is no reason to demand it be cut or else.
The school is being silly, at best, but it is not a public school. They can have whatever standards they choose. Were it a public school then there is room for complaint by taxpayers and inmates. It is a private school. If hair style is the parents’ primary educational value for their child then they should homeschool her or dump her into public school.
As long as she keeps it washed.....I don’t see a problem.
I expected to see a girl with pink spiked hair or worse., rattails, dreadlocks,
She is not a distraction and shouldn’t be chastised.
Honors student?
Of course she must be expelled. There are future low-info voters who need the place.
It’s a private school, they make the rules. If the parents don’t like the rules, don’t send your kids there.
I would guess because it looks unkempt to the extreme.
I think the young lady need to snap a rubber band around that Big Ol’ Tumbleweed, or braid it up nicely, then get on with her schoolwork! Chop-Chop! The hair is a big frizzy, shapeless mess. I’m sorry, but it looks unkempt, and she is being indulgent. If she gets away with this ‘style’ by the time you can say Rasta-Farian’, somebody will come to school wearing those thick dusty dredlocks. Private Schools can have standards (for now, at least). You are free to go elsewhere. The girl is making the whole thing about her, and Mom is playing right into the Drama. This could be one of her first lessons about knowing when to conform and get on with the job at hand.
Presumably this is a private, religious school and, apart from meeting legitimate state requirements (not federal) concerning substantive subjects, it should be a matter of choice by the parents which school a child attends and that choice can turn on matters of hairstyle if that is the parents' preoccupation.
When children are forced into a government school, we must turn ourselves into pretzels protecting the civil rights of the children and balancing those rights against the need to educate without distraction. Generally, the distraction comes from other students or their parents reacting. Often the decision goes to an unelected bureaucrat who administers the school and comes down like a fascist against a distraction so the First Amendment rights, indeed the rights contained in the bill of rights, are sacrificed to the homogenization requirements of educrats.
Under a voucher program, the students are presumably among compatible colleagues and when they find they are not they go find a school which is more congenial.
If they are somehow singling this girl out because of her wild hair, then that is wrong-headed, IMHO.
I would guess because it looks unkempt to the extreme.
Or the school could look at its rules to see if they were still being applied appropriately. I’m not saying that they school doesn’t have the right to do this, but its rules may be being misapplied.
private school their rules
It’s a private school.. they can set the rules and you don’t have to send your kid there. It’s plain and simple.
Tell that to the kid who sits behind her and can't see the blackboard...........
“I would guess because it looks unkempt to the extreme.”
It doesn’t look good to me. In fact, I think it fits her quite well. Cute kid.
The school is wrong but that big mass of hair will block the view of students sitting behind her which creates its own form of distraction.
African school girls don't wear their hair like that. Why? Because they have standards. Shame on freepers for advocating lower or no standards. Unruly asymmetric hair is off putting to just about everyone of all races in just about every country in the world, the possible exception being a few tiny countries.
Why do these people pick a school, then try and do it “their way”? If the school finds her hair growth of 3 years has become a distraction she needs to move on to a more liberal, tolerant, accepting school. Everyone wants to be an exception these days. It all boils down to having no rules.
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