in another inspirational story of youth gone wild and letting no good deed go unpunished, i present for your momentary attention, one mister gerardo garcia junior.<\/p>\n
gerardo got a wacky idea that he would grow his hair to donate to locks of love<\/a>, to make pediatric chemo and burn patients feel a little better along a very rough journey.<\/p>\n this, as you may or may not be aware, is something i do myself, and something i support wholeheartedly. in fact, i’m overdue for a hair harvest myself – i’ll be sending matching sets of 16-inch braids here “any day now” when i come up with an appropriately dramatic publicity stunt.<\/p>\n so what brings gerardo to my attention? he’s not allowed to do it.<\/p>\n it seems that the school district in which mr. garcia attends high school has a dress code, and part of that dress code is that boys aren’t allowed to have hair past their shoulders or over their eyes.<\/p>\n Harlingen Superintendent Linda Wade, who had to enforce the school dress code, said she did find it difficult to order Garcia to cut his hair.<\/p>\n “This was certainly a difficult decision to make,” Wade said. “On one hand, we have this young man doing something that shows responsibility and enforcing everything we try and teach our kids in school.<\/p>\n “But my job is to enforce a criteria set forth to create the best atmosphere for learning that fosters respect for adults and rules and prepares students for the work place.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n so, congratulations, ms. wade, you have taught the lesson that enforcing arbitrary rules is more important that considering the circumstances of the issue at hand. and you have done so in great form.<\/p>\n but all that was weeks ago – the reason it came to me is that the ap wire carried the news<\/a> [ab via abc news, september 16, 2004] that the school board denied gerardo garcia’s appeal.<\/p>\n instead, the school board decided that the dress code was more important than the inspired efforts of a teenager, and offered to buy out his good intentions with a $500 donation to the american cancer society and the laughable title of school liason.<\/p>\n the local paper’s editorial<\/a> and letters to the editor<\/a> on the subject is worth a quick read.<\/p>\n “They just can’t see that I want to make a difference,” he said. “There are already plenty of organizations that give money.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n i see it. i applaud it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" in another inspirational story of youth gone wild and letting no good deed go unpunished, i present for your momentary attention, one mister gerardo garcia junior. gerardo got a wacky idea that he would grow his hair to donate to locks of love, to make pediatric chemo and burn patients feel a little better along […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1410"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1410\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rojisan.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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