There have been plenty of jaw-dropping school dress code stories to make headlines over the years, but this next one is so out there, it's almost hard to believe. According to the parents of Juelz Trice of Pearland, Texas, an administrator at Berry Miller Junior High recently pulled their son aside to tell him he was violating school dress code — with his hair. If he didn't do something about it immediately, he'd face in-school suspension.
The unnamed administrator then posed an ultimatum.
"He came over and said, 'You have two options: You can either go to (in-school suspension) or color it in,'" Juelz told ABC 13 Eyewitness News. "Everyone was coming up to me. It was like the talk of the school that day and the day after."
Not wanting to face suspension, the seventh-grader picked the latter option, even though it felt … well, kind of wrong.
The next thing he knew, black Sharpie ink was on his scalp, filling in the spaces where he'd recently gotten a cool new design shaved into the side.
When he got home after school that day, his parents were (unsurprisingly) not pleased.
"When it first happened, I was very upset because I didn't find out until after he got off the bus and he got into the car and said, 'Look what they did to my head,'" said Juelz's mother, Angela Washington.
According to ABC 13, the school's dress code clearly states that "extreme hair styles such as carvings, mohawks, spikes, etc. are not allowed." But as for disciplinary action? Nowhere in the rule book does it advise to "color in the lines of a student's scalp."
Juelz's father, Dante Trice, also pointed out that drawing on open pores with a chemical-laden marker is serious business.
"It was wide open because he had just got his hair cut the day before, so it was wide open," Dante said of his son's pores. "I'm totally disappointed. Totally disappointed."
The boy's mother shared that the administrator responsible for the whole Sharpie fiasco called her personally to apologize and explain.
"They were very apologetic, but it still happened," she said. "You know, for an adult, no one should think that's the correct way to handle a situation."
In the wake of the incident, the administrator has been placed on leave, and officials say further action will be taken soon.
The parents also filed a civil rights lawsuit for damages and want the district to go through racial sensitivity training about certain haircuts, CBS 12 reports. As for Juelz? He's since returned to school and is trying to put the whole thing behind him.
