Schools crack down on dance routines

After a performance by a Jonesboro High School dance team, all dance, cheerleading and band members in the Clayton County public schools now will have to get their routines approved by an administrator.

The new policy, announced Thursday, came two weeks after the Jonesboro dancers were criticized for performing provocatively at a basketball game Jan. 13. The dance team has since been disbanded, and its coach has been removed.

“We’re going to have a standard — a standard of how they can dance, how they can dress and the certain parts of the body they can or can’t show,” schools Superintendent John Thompson said.

Thompson announced the new policy at a parents’ meeting Thursday. He said he met with all middle and high school principals, coaches and band directors on Wednesday to outline the new policy.

Thompson said he would have stopped the Jonesboro girls, who performed in thigh high stockings, tiny shorts and tight shirts. A video that was posted online shows the girls dancing on chairs, then boys coming out of the crowd to sit on the chairs while the girls dance in front of them.

“You had better be glad that the superintendent was not at that game,” Thompson told the parents. “I would have stopped it. Somebody should have stopped it.”

Thompson said he did not know why none of the assistant principals in the audience didn’t stop the dance.

“From now on, everybody will know what to expect,” Thompson said. “If you are a teacher in that audience, you need to make a move and go out there and cut that out. You need to be that strong.”

At least one administrator had reviewed the Jonesboro dance, but only a portion of the routine, district spokesman Charles White said. The administrator, who has not been identified, saw neither the girls’ outfits nor the portion involving the chairs, White said.

The unidentified dance coach is under investigation by the district’s human resources department, White said.

In addition to all routines being approved, a trained dancer who is a teacher will talk to student performers about judgment and what is “respectable,” Thompson said.

“They cannot do what the college girls are doing,” he said. “When you come to Clayton County schools, there is an expectation — not only from those girls, but from the students, the teachers and the administrators.”