HOUSTON (AP) — On Tuesday, a federal judge dismissed most claims in a lawsuit filed by a Black high school student who accused school officials of racial and gender discrimination for punishing him over his hairstyle.
The ruling marked another victory for the Barbers Hill school district near Houston, which maintains that its policy on male students' hair length promotes discipline, grooming, and respect for authority.
However, U.S. District Judge Jeffrey Brown questioned the policy's overall benefit in his order.
"Not everything that is undesirable, annoying, or even harmful amounts to a violation of the law, much less a constitutional problem," Brown wrote.
The Associated Press reached out to the school district and the student's attorney, Allie Booker, for comments but received no response.
The student, George, 18, was excluded from regular high school classes for much of the 2023-24 school year due to the district's dress code policy, serving either in-school suspension or attending an off-site disciplinary program. The district argued that George's long hair, styled in tied and twisted locs, violated the dress code as it would fall below his shirt collar, eyebrows, or earlobes if let down. They noted that other students with locs complied with the length policy.
George and his mother, Darresha George, filed a federal civil rights lawsuit against the school district, its superintendent, principal, assistant principal, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, and Attorney General Ken Paxton. They claimed that George's punishment violated the CROWN Act, a state law prohibiting race-based hair discrimination, which took effect in September. The CROWN Act bans penalties for hair texture or protective hairstyles such as Afros, braids, locs, twists, or Bantu knots.
The lawsuit alleged that the district's policy was mainly enforced against Black students. However, Brown found that George had not demonstrated "a persistent, widespread practice of disparate, race-based enforcement of the policy."
The suit also claimed that George's First Amendment rights to free speech were violated, but Brown noted that there was no case law supporting hair length as protected expressive conduct under the First Amendment.
Brown dismissed claims that George's due process rights under the 14th Amendment were violated and dropped Abbott, Paxton, the district superintendent, and other school employees from the case. The only claim that remained was for sex discrimination, due to the lack of a clear reason for the policy allowing girls to have long hair but not boys.
"Because the district does not provide any reason for the sex-based distinctions in its dress code, the claim survives this initial stage," Brown said.
Brown's order follows a state judge's February ruling that the district's punishment did not violate the CROWN Act.
At the conclusion of his ruling, Brown referenced a 1970 case where a judge ruled against an El Paso school district's hair length policy for male students, a decision later overturned by an appeals court. The judge in that case had stated that enforcing the hair-cut rule caused more classroom disruption than the hair it sought to prohibit.
"Regrettably, so too here," Brown commented on George’s case.
Barbers Hill's hair policy was also challenged in a May 2020 federal lawsuit by two other students, one of whom returned to the high school after a federal judge granted a temporary injunction. That lawsuit is still pending.
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