Girl who shaved head for charity told she must wear wig to school
Slarti Bartfast
Posts: 6,607 Forum Member
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A teenager who shaved her head for a cancer charity has been told to wear a wig to school or risk being disciplined.
Jess Vine, 15, cut off her waist-length hair to raise more than £400 for Cancer Research after losing her grandfather to the disease.
http://metro.co.uk/2014/04/07/teenager-who-shaved-head-for-cancer-charity-told-she-must-wear-wig-to-school-4690914/
A familiar scenario? Why do schools adopt this hardline approach when it comes to hairstyles? The sensible (and nice) thing would surely have been to support her.
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We never had that trouble, as I left in 1990, and shoulder-length curtains a la Happy Mondays / Inspiral Carpets etc were all the rage. I sported a full on Clint Boon haircut back then
saying that though, some kid in america got sent home from school because their afro hair was too big!
No afro is ever too big.
She should be praised for what she did. It's not as though she done it to make a fashion statement.
What if a child at the school lost their hair through chemotherapy or something? Would they be in breach of the strict uniform policy too?
Even if you are donating your hair to a charity and being sponsored to do it in memory if a family member who has died from cancer? Of course the priority should be to check your schools uniform policy....
I would probably do similar to this actually
Its probably a bit of an educational fad, but uniform policies have become very much stricter than in my day. If you believe in a strict uniform policy then you have to uphold it, otherwise who decides what is a valid reason to break it and what is not?
They wouldn't accept her 'excuse' that during summer break, she went swimming at a friend's local public swimming pool, and it turned her hair 'sickly green and yellow'. She cut her hair as a short crop. There were still some green showing. She shaved the rest off. It already grew an inch long when we returned to school.
The headmaster said it can only happen to bleached hair, not natural blonde hair like hers. He wouldn't budge on her suspension until she was willing to wear a wig. She refused. She was transferred to another school shortly after that.
This happened well over 25 years ago, so it's not a new thing, really.
Even if it wasn't for some meaningful cause, why would it matter that someone's head had less hair on it, than others had on theirs? Long hair, I can see being a problem, in very specific circumstances, and then you can have rules for those circumstances. But lack of hair should be of no consequence.
Perhaps the way forward is for schools to make it a policy that any kids who want to embark on fund-raising activities do it through the school, in a way that the school can approve of?
^ This, bolded the first part as I think that's a very good statement.
No, it's unnecessary.
That seems a little obtuse.
I mean, if this girl really wanted to raise money on behalf of her dear old granddad, surely if the school could have organised something that achieved that goal without creating a disciplinary issue then everybody's a winner?
Seems like the only reason to object to the idea is to enable kids to get away with doing stupid things on the pretext of charity.
No not really because her having her head should be a non issue in the first place.
By stupid things you mean this particular rule then.
Only if you think schools shouldn't have some duty to try and maintain certain standards of appearance within the student body.
No, I mean by deciding to participate in an activity that puts you in breach of a school rule rather than doing something else instead.
It'd be kinda like me deciding I was going to do a sponsored drive across the country at 100mph and then whining when I got banned from driving for doing so.
On first reading I thought it said "girl have head for charity". Now that is a step too far.
I'd have gone with a hijab