Not every comment makes it to print.
It was about five weeks ago that New Jersey high school wrestler Andrew Johnson was forced to cut his dreadlocks on the spot to participate in a match. The decision made by referee Alan Maloney struck a nerve with students and parents of color, who saw themselves — or their children — in the teen, and found the referee's call as racist in nature.
While it was not happening in his district, DeKalb County School District Superintendent Steve Green had an eye on the story. He was asked about the situation by a reporter immediately after Andrew’s story went viral.
“I can’t speak for others in this situation nor do I care to do so,” he said in December via text. “What I can say is that in DeKalb if the coach decided to forfeit the meet or the match in support of a student/player who was forced to choose between his heritage and the match, he or she and the team would receive a congratulatory note from me for ‘winning.’ ”
While Andrew’s hair was longer than regulations allow, Maloney apparently told the teen to either cut his hair or not be allowed to wrestle.
The teen, according to rules, should have been allowed to tie his hair back, or cover it with a cap. The teen had been wearing a cap; The referee told him his cap did not comply with regulations.
Maloney was suspended, banned from officiating matches in the Buena Regional School District, of which Andrew Johnson's team was a part. The wrestler's parents condemned the haircutting, with mom Rosa Santiago-Johnson writing on Facebook that watching the act was the "hardest thing I've ever seen."
“He is good now,” she continued, “but that was brutal emotionally and physically.”
Green’s comments on the incident never made it into a published news story, but they do serve as insights into his commitment to making DeKalb schools fair places to operate.
Green has been an educator for more than 40 years. He's made a career out of being a curriculum and instruction guru, but has placed emphasis on concerns that leave students of color vulnerable to disparities in education and achievement. He came to Georgia in 2015 and immediately plotted a course to address the district's discipline numbers. Even without looking at them, he said past experience showed students of color across the country were being disproportionately pushed out of classrooms and facing criminal punishment for classroom infraction.
In early 2017, with President Donald Trump signing executive orders blocking travel from some immigrants and refugees into the United States, Green sent a message to his staff that the DeKalb County School District's immigrant students and parents should know they are supported.
“We established a plan then to follow up … with [mandatory] webinars [for staff] coming from that, as well as parent engagement,” he said then about efforts to educate staff and provide support. “We advocate for keeping families intact. Any kind of threat to that wholeness of family impacts wholeness of the child.
“As public educators, we educate all children, regardless of where they come from.”
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