The Vance County Board of Education couldn’t escape the hair issue after all Monday night.
For the fourth consecutive meeting, someone signed up from the public to address the question of whether high school coaches are using discriminatory policies to limit the hairstyles student-athletes may sport. For the third consecutive meeting, someone actually appeared to address the issue. (The initial request to speak went unfulfilled when the man who made the request failed to appear.)
For perhaps the first time, however, the speaker hardly mentioned hair.
Michael Muhammad of the Vance-Granville Local Organizing Committee submitted his request to appear before the school board Friday morning, which unfortunately was more than a day after the agenda packets were compiled. (We at HomeinHenderson.com apologize for mistakenly indicating that no one had signed up to speak Monday night.)
Muhammad’s stated topic was “ethnic hairstyle and sports within VC public school system.” But he devoted most of his three minutes to the bigger, racist picture he sees behind the hairstyle dispute.
He said there have been several attempts to resolve the issue of ethnic hairstyles and sports, but what could have been a simple issue has evolved to reveal discrimination through unwritten policies that target black students. (He did not mention any students who were blocked from playing sports by such a policy; the teenager at Southern Vance High School who was the subject of the initial complaint played the full basketball season with his ethnic hairstyle.)
“It’s not an issue of safety. It’s an issue of style and appearance,” Muhammad said.
But he quickly moved into “other issues” in the Vance County school system.
He said blacks are massively overrepresented on the disciplinary lists, making up more than four-fifths of the students who are hit with out-of-school suspension. He said black students are the ones being punished most often even at Aycock and Zeb Vance elementary schools, which he said are the only two of the county’s 15 public schools that are not majority-black.
He complained that 63 percent of the school system’s certified teachers are white, and they can’t relate to the blacks who make up the majority of their students.
“There’s a lack of cultural diversity and a lack of respect for it,” Muhammad said.
“This is an issue that actually has pushed a lot of our black students toward a disciplinary issue because they look different,” he said.
He said the Local Organizing Committee has asked for an investigation by the Office of Civil Rights in the Department of Education. He urged the Board of Education also to look into the policies in place.
“We care about little Rahim and little Shaniqua, just like you care about little Tommy and Betty Sue. We want to see them treated fairly in the school system,” Muhammad said. “That’s all we ask.”
As is the school board’s practice, explained by Chairman Tommy Riddle before Muhammad spoke, neither the board members nor system staffers responded to the presentation.
“We’re here to listen to you, not to respond,” Riddle said.