School orders boy, 4, to braid long locks

MESQUITE, Texas - A Texas school board has agreed to adjust its grooming policy for a 4-year-old boy whose long, flowing hair got him suspended. But his mother says it isn't enough.

Pre-kindergartner Taylor Pugh has been under in-school suspension since November at Floyd Elementary School in Balch Springs near Dallas. He sits alone with a teacher's aid in the school library.

After a closed-door meeting Monday, the Mesquite school board decided Taylor could wear his hair braided but keep it no longer than his ears.

Taylor's mother, Elizabeth, plans to keep fighting. She says her son likes his hair long and braiding it would make his scalp bleed.

She says she'll take Taylor to school in a ponytail Tuesday, acknowledging it will keep him suspended.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/34818450/

You gotta go see the picture- his hair is barely "long" in my book. Do girls have to wear their hair shorter than that too? Crazy, stupid.

Both sides in that dispute are being stupid. The dress code makes no sense and the parents are being intractable.

Yep, JW they are. But I would find myself supporting the parents because I don't believe a public institution has the right to impose such a stupid consequence- the denial of a free public education not to mention that there is likely some civil rights violation involved. The parents have more rights to be stupid than the school board does.

While I agree that the rule is dumb I can't bring myself to believe requiring someone to get a haircut is a civil rights violation. It would be different if the kid was a Hassidic Jew or Sikh, but not otherwise. BTW: They are not denying him an education. The kid still goes to school, he just has a private tutor.

I also agree the parents have more right to be stupid than the shool board but, in this case, my sympathies have switched from the parents to the school board. It seems to me the Board has offered a reasonable compromise and it is the paents who are just trying to mlk their fifteen minutes of fame.

I would only be inclined to agree if the rule were the same for girls. Can they make girls wear a specific hairstyle? Braid as opposed to ponytails?

I think asking to cut the kid's hair is stupid, and suspending the kid is punishing the wrong person (how much say does a 4 yr old really have about their hair?) However, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that long hair be braided, and the parents really are being ridiculous refusing to do that (and perhaps are flat out nuts if they really believe that it's going to make his scalp bleed). I don't think I see much difference between a braid and a ponytail, though, so don't know why a ponytail won't suffice either. I can understand the school perhaps asking ALL kids to keep long hair tied back so it isn't in their face when they are doing active things. Of course, I do think such rules should apply equally to boys and girls.

Public education isn't free, it's publicly funded.

I think all kids with long hair should be strongly encouraged to keep it pulled back as well. Head lice, as Sid mentioned, is a very real health issue in every public school i've ever worked in. The letters go home every year. I keep my boys hair very short for that reason. (also, they refuse to comb it. haha) If i had girls, or boys that felt strongly they wanted long flowing locks I would 1. insist that they learned to wash and care for it appropriately themselves, and 2. insist they put it back in a ponytail or some such thing while at school. It isn't just headlice--the kids eat together at their desks or side by side in lunch rooms, and no one needs someone else's greasy locks in their soup.

This does seem to be a lot of energy by the school board for nothing, and since i know school boards generally don't have time to waste, it makes me suspect there's more to this than we're hearing. I wonder if there were complaints from other parents about either repeated headlice scares, or dirty greasy hair. Parent complaints are the only thing i can think of that would make the board turn hair into a priority.

I don't really think head lice care if you have long or short hair. The only difference is the difficulty of getting rid of them if you already have them (and that's when even little girls get their hair cut short to make it easier to comb through the short hair to get rid of them). It also doesn't make much difference in terms of hair cleanliness (it's also a myth that head lice have anything to do with being dirty...lice don't discriminate). It might LOOK more obvious that long hair is dirty (then again, in a 4-year-old, I really don't think you'd see it the way you would notice greasy hair in someone post-pubertal), but short hair can be dirty and greasy too. But, having had long hair my entire life, I can certainly vouch that it can be a safety issue. It can get caught up on the chains on swings in the playground, or something other kids can grab and pull in gym class, gets in your face when you are trying to do things, and when you get older and start getting into science classes with open flames and beakers of chemicals, wearing a ponytail was no longer optional but required. So, I have no problem with the requirement for wearing ponytails or braids, but am not sure most of the reasons given made a lot of sense either.

As for it taking parental complaints to make hair length an issue, I'm not so sure. This IS a TX school. It may not have been a priority of the school board except for having a principal perhaps being very draconian about enforcing rules. Perhaps if they FIRST asked to have the kid wear his hair tied back, it would not have escalated, but my guess is the parents were first told to have his hair cut and have now dug their heels in and are fighting for the sake of fighting rather than seeing there really is a reasonable compromise in there now.

probably now just a fight over who's the boss.