Kindergarten Boy Suspended for His 'Distracting' Mohawk
When 5-year-old Ethan Clos showed up at school with a short, spiky mohawk last week, his fellow kindergarteners thought it was cool. But administrators at Reid Primary and Middle School in Springfield, Ohio, deemed the edgy cut too disruptive, and ordered him home until he adopted a tamer style.
His mom, Keshia Castle, said that school officials suspended her son
on Wednesday. After he begged her for the hairstyle, she finally let him
get it over spring break.
"They seen his hair like it was," she told WHIO-TV on Friday. "All the little kids were going over and feeling on it and everything."
Superintendent Gregg Morris says that's exactly why they had to send little Ethan home.
"Our dress and grooming policies are designed to ensure that clothing
and hairstyles do not cause a distraction to the learning environment,"
Morris said in a statement.
The school's handbook
states that "Hair shall be worn above the eyebrows and must be kept
clean, neat and trimmed" and specifies that boys may not wear their hair
longer than the bottom of their shirt collars. It also says: "Hair
styling or coloring arrangements which are disruptive or distracting are
not permissible."
“Our policy clearly states that any dress or grooming which is
disruptive or distracting to the educational process is not acceptable,"
Morris verified to WHIO-TV. "In this particular case, the student’s
hairstyle did provide disruption to the classroom."
Ethan's grandmother, Joyce Wells, thinks the suspension was too harsh
a penalty to pay for a hairstyle. A mohawk, she said, isn't really that
different from other styles where the hair is cut close to the scalp,
especially if the mohawk itself is short.
"I could understand if it was colored, and if it stood up off longer
of his head," his grandmother said. "But I don't see nothing wrong with
this."
This isn't the mile-high, stiffly gelled punk look of the past. (In
fact, if they hadn't used styling product to give his mohawk some
definition, Ethan's hair would probably have looked much like a typical
military cut.) The child's stylist may have taken a cue from celebrity
kids like Maddox Jolie-Pitt and Willow Smith,
both of whom have sported the spiky look, to mixed reviews. Kingston
Rossdale (son of rockers Gwen Stefani and Gavin Rossdale), Madonna's
4-year-old son David Banda,
and Cruz Beckham (whose parents are sport-and-style icons David and
Victoria Beckham) have also sported modified mohawks, where the sides
are cut close, rather than shaved bare, and a strip of hair on the top
is left a bit longer.
In 2009 (and again in 2011), a volunteer football coach at the local
high school wore a blond-tipped Mohawk to motivate his team. When a
WHIO-TV reporter asked Morris why the coach's hair was acceptable while
the kindergartener's was not, Morris said that the two situations are
totally different.
“One involved an extracurricular spirit initiative designed to
motivate our kids in the football playoffs a year ago," Morris
explained. "Classrooms were not disrupted. The other poses a disruption
to the learning environment as well as violates the student dress code."
Ethan's mom told WHIO-TV
that her son would return to school on Monday, after she has his head
shaved, but the style shouldn't have been such a big deal.
"He's a 5-year-old little boy who chose to wear his hair a certain way," she told the news station.
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