And people wonder why some parents and school administrators are constantly at war…
Parents in Montgomery, New York are fuming over a recent decision by school leaders to ban high school students from wearing scarves.
Last time I checked it was November and the temperatures were plummeting, not rising. That said you would think most reasonable adults would be encouraging kids to bundle up.
Apparently, not in Montgomery.
According to news reports, the school board (allegedly comprised of highly educated adults) initiated the ban after a boy wore a scarf to school and it was interpreted as a form of “gang paraphernalia.”
That’s right; teachers and administrators at Valley Central High School were afraid that scarves somehow promoted gang activity so they banned all forms of neckwear from school buildings, period.
A local TV station interviewed the boy in question shortly after the ban went into effect and asked him if his decision to wear a scarf to school on a chilly November day was to show support for gangs.
The boy’s response: “I wear scarves because they match my outfit!”
In the days following the ban’s implementation students protested by wearing scarves all day inside school buildings. Parents also jumped on the protest bandwagon and demanded the school board lift the ban.
Students who dared to defy the ban were written up and reprimanded by school officials. That, of course, incited additional outrage by concerned parents, who claimed school administrators were overreacting to a single incident they felt was interpreted incorrectly. The irate parents also noted that the school already bans kids from wearing jackets indoors for safety reasons and by putting the kibosh on scarves students had no means of extra warmth.
That was last week. A few days ago the school board acknowledged that they may have been a bit hasty in instituting a school-wide ban of scarves and agreed to allow students to wear “appropriate” forms of neckwear on campus.
Nice to see parents’ tax dollars at work, huh?
What do you make of the scarf ban/un-ban?
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