As parents, it is very difficult to trust a small child with another person. Unless they are someone you can trust intimately like a grandparent or a sibling, you never really know who is watching your child. And even though public schools are supposed to be staffed with respectable adults and professionals, just a glance at any news paper and you’re bound to see reports about child molestation and other abuses coming from the school system.
But a recent report from a Boston area school should be enough to terrify parents all across the country. When school administrators did a routine check for head lice, they thought they saw signs of lice in the hair of a little girl named Tru.
While it is a good idea for schools to take decisive action to prevent the spread of lice, you’d think they’d at least notify the girl’s parents first. Tru is a seven-year-old child whose mother trusted the school to protect her during the day.
But instead of telling mom that they thought Tru had lice, the school shaved the child’s hair off.
You can imagine the shock mom Denise Robinson was in for when she found her daughter, who had a beautiful head of hair in the morning, completely bald because the school decided she shouldn’t have hair.
Mom was so shocked she didn’t know what to do. And a few hours later, she decided to come forward on social media to expose the school for its violation of the girl’s rights. And that’s when mom accused the school of assaulting her daughter when they did not tell mom they were going to shave her head.
“Tru was assaulted yesterday at school! And anyone who knows me knows I never claim racism! But why was my daughter’s head shaved? There are three other girls in her class two white girls and one black, none of these girls got scaled? Why Tru?? My child is mixed race, and her hair WAS FULL and curly. She DID NOT, and I repeat have head lice or bugs! So why did this happen? A moment of truth is at 8 a.m. #WhyTru. Please help me by making this go viral.”
And viral it went.
Because Tru was mixed race and had different hair than other children in the class, mom believes she was singled out.
Whether or not that is true, the school should never have shaved the child’s head without talking to her mother first. Mom could have made sure she was treated if indeed she did have head lice.
Tru’s mother is now working with a lawyer to get to the bottom of the situation.
“There was no hygienical reason for them to shave my child’s head. There were no head lice. There were no bed bugs. There was no, what I refer to as, Rasta locks going on,” Robinson told station NECN. “Her hair was two pony tails on the side on Saturday, and it was braided in the ponytails, and there was nothing wrong.”
Apparently, before her shaving off Tru’s hair, a school volunteer told the little girl “by shaving her head, her hair would grow back straight,” CBS Boston reports.