Posts Tagged ‘teacher took pair of scissors to her tresses’

Teacher Gives Down syndrome Girl a Haircut Without Consent

September 28, 2012

One wonders why the teacher couldn’t have just picked out the offending food from the child’s hair:

A North Carolina mother is outraged after she said a teacher at her daughter’s school chopped some of the hair of the seven-year-old girl suffering from Down syndrome without parental consent.

Jesslyn Stirewalp adored her long, brown hair, gazing at her own reflection in the mirror and saying that her locks were ‘pretty.’

‘Most of the time, she’s always brushing her hair, always doing something with her hair,’ the girl’s mother, Jessica Stirewalp, said.

But all that apparently changed following an incident at Millbridge Elementary School last week.

‘She doesn’t even get in front of the mirror anymore,’ Jesslyn’s grandmother, Mary Poole, told the station WSOCTV.

According to the child’s family, the seven-year-old was in class last Friday when one of her teachers took a pair of scissors to her tresses after allegedly noticing that some food got stuck in the girl’s hair.

‘Her assistant teacher calls me and says, “I hope you don’t mind, but I cut your daughter’s hair because she got food in it,”’ Stirewalp said. ‘Of course, I got mad, but I asked her how much, and she said “four inches.”’

However, when the girl returned home from school, Stirewalp said she was in for an even bigger shock.

‘Instead of four inches, it was more (like) eight inches. And when she walked in the house, you could tell that she thought she was in trouble,’ Stirewalp said. ‘I mean, it hurts my feelings, and I know it hurts her feelings.’