Robyn Urback: When did education get so stupid?

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Robyn Urback | March 25, 2014 3:07 PM ET
More from Robyn Urback | @RobynUrback

A little girl in Grand Junction, Colo. was banned from school for shaving her head in support of a friend with cancer. Nine-year-old Kamryn Renfro shaved her head after her best friend, 11-year-old Delaney Clements, started undergoing chemotherapy for neuroblastoma and lost all of her hair. Thoughful, right? The only problem was that Kamryn’s shaved head was in violation of her school’s dress code — a breach that administrators at Caprock Academy were not willing to overlook. Kamryn was told that she could not return to school unless she wore a wig or waited for her natural hair to grow back.

When one New Zealand school tossed its playground rules and let students risk injury, the results were surprising

AUCKLAND, New Zealand — It was a meeting Principal Bruce McLachlan awaited with dread.

One of the 500 students at Swanson School in a northwest borough of Auckland had just broken his arm on the playground, and surely the boy’s parent, who had requested this face-to-face chat with its headmaster, was out for blood.

It had been mere months since the gregarious principal threw out the rulebook on the playground of concrete and mud, dotted with tall trees and hidden corners; just weeks since he had stopped reprimanding students who whipped around on their scooters or wielded sticks in play sword fights.

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In a statement to media, Catherine Norton Breman, president and chair of the school’s board of directors, explained that the dress code “was created to promote safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students. Under this policy, shaved heads are not permitted.”

The girls’ mothers took the issue to social media, leaving the school to be thoroughly and appropriately shamed. Unsurprisingly, Caprock Academy has backed off its decision and welcomed Kamryn back to class, shaved head and all.

There’s a disturbingly blind adherence to procedure and lack of common sense at play here, which seems evermore characteristic of contemporary schoolyard scandals. Rules are rules, we’re told by school administrators; no cheese sandwiches, no plastic bags, no Halloween costumes — discretion be damned. These schools end up focusing so narrowly on their own rulebooks that they ignore the bigger picture. Where’s the education in that?

One of the more disturbing recent examples of policy trumping good judgment involved the tragic case of 12-year-old Ryan Gibbons, who suffered a fatal asthma attack at his school in Straffordville, Ontario in 2012. The policy at Ryan’s school was to keep all medicine — including emergency inhalers — locked away in the principal’s office. The school had even phoned Ryan’s mom on a number of occasions to report that administrators had found Ryan with an inhaler and had confiscated the life-saving medicine. On the day Ryan died, his inhaler was locked in the principal’s office, as per the school’s rule. Ryan’s mom is now working with a local MPP to make sure the same thing never happens again.