A week ago, I was returning home from a meeting in the early evening. About a half mile from home, I waited at an intersection to yield to an ambulance heading in the direction of our place. I could see additional vehicles with flashing lights, so I waited for a fire truck, a fire department command vehicle, and a law enforcement vehicle. When I turned onto our street, it was blocked by emergency vehicles. I had to turn around in a neighbor’s driveway and go back and then around to our house by an alternate route that allowed me to approach our home from the other side. I couldn’t tell what the emergency was, but I didn’t notice smoke so assumed that it might be a medical emergency. After I got home, we went for a walk and we could still see flashing lights down our street. We decided to stay away from the area, as the last thing emergency responders need are noisy neighbors gawking at the scene of a situation to which they are responding. We couldn’t see or smell smoke and we talked about what might be happening, and again decided that a medical emergency might be the most likely cause of all of the responders on our street.

Our neighborhood is fairly quiet. When we read the newspaper each week, we take note of the police and fire news. It is a small town weekly paper and always has a report of every response made by emergency crews. Most of the time the emergency calls are to places that are not near our house. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been issues. A couple of months ago there was an incident a few blocks from our home that made the newspaper. A person was moving out of a rental home and getting assistance from his mother. A dispute between the mother and the landlord erupted that resulted in the landlord pulling a gun on the mother. He was subsequently arrested and has been charged with a couple of felonies over the incident. He has been arraigned and is currently in jail with a high bond waiting for trial. That seemed to be a pretty wild story for our neighborhood. And, there was a house across the street that was under construction for all of the first year we lived here as the result of a major fire. A barbecue had been left unattended that set the back of the house on fire and caused extensive damage.

It turns out that all of the flashing lights last week was a house fire. Yesterday’s paper reported that a house fire sent one person to the hospital to be treated for minor smoke inhalation after a fire started in a bedroom. The story reports that the fire battalion chief reported that although the fire was contained to the bedroom, smoke damage throughout the house and attic has rendered the house unlivable. Reading the article in the newspaper, I wondered if the home might not have had working smoke alarms. For some reason the person who suffered smoke inhalation did not exit the home in time to avoid injury. That seems pretty uncommon with the safety equipment available for homes. I do not know the details of the story, but it is a reminder that we all need to be vigilant to be sure our homes have effective safety devices and that we have escape plans.

Another news story caught my attention this morning. This one from Texas where a judge ruled that a school district did not discriminate against a high school student when it punished him over dreadlocks. The case is currently on appeal, and it certainly looks like the judge’s opinion might be reversed. The school district claimed that their rule was not race based. The policy says hair cannot be “blow the top of a T-shirt collar, below the eyebrows, or below the ear lobes when let down.” I’m pretty sure that the rule is only applied to males, which makes it sound gender based. Texas has a law that specifically prohibits race-based discrimination against people based on their hairstyle called the Crown Act. The school district required two students to cut their dreadlocks in 2020, their families sued, and a federal judge ruled that the district’s hair policy was discriminatory.

While it certainly seems like the school district is on the wrong side of justice in this case, what caught my eye was the existence of such a restrictive hair policy. More than 50 years ago, my brother was expelled from high school over the length of his hair. Our family sued over the policy, but lost the case. The district judge’s option was reversed on appeal, but by that time my brother was a college student, having earned his GED and moved on with his life.

I thought that rules that set different standards for male and female students about the length of hair had long ago been eliminated. Over the years, I’ve known a lot of students and more than a few male teachers whose hair easily touched the collar of their shirts. Rapid City, where our children graduated from High School, has lots of long-haired students. It is traditional for Lakota men to wear their hair long and a motorcycle rally, with lots of long-haired people is an annual feature in that town with a major impact on the area’s economy. People don’t make a fuss over the length of a person’s hair, and such a policy there would clearly be seen as discriminatory against Lakota youth. Our son had long hair during part of his high school career and it was not a problem for him or for other students. He grew up to be a successful adult and a contributing member of society.

I fail to see how the length of a student’s hair is something that needs to be regulated by a school district. I worry when schools, which are short of funds, continue to invest resources in battles. Imagine the legal fees the district has spent in recent years, diverting funds from the education of students.

It seems that just like we need to be vigilant to keep our families and neighbors safe from the dangers of house fires, we need to be vigilant to keep our communities safe from discrimination and school boards and administrators that are distracted from the goals of public education.