Pearland ISD grapples with diversity
Parents call for dress code update after events prompt concerns of inequality
An assistant principal used a Sharpie on an African American student’s scalp to fill in a design shaved into his new fade haircut.
A school administrator asked a Muslim girl to get a note from her imam confirming she wears a hijab for religious reasons.
These recent incidents at Pearland ISD schools enraged some parents, who said the district’s dress code was used to justify discriminatory practices and who worry that they signal deeply entrenched tension between the city’s white community and a rapidly growing minority population.
Some parents demanded a dress code update, the formation of a committee that included students to represent diverse perspectives, and implementation of cultural sensitivity training for staff. The school district responded with a statement saying it would “identify and remove any perceived racial, cultural and religious insensitivities” from the 2019-20 dress code, then issued a revised code last week.
While some say the district’s response was a move, albeit tardy, in the right direction, they remain concerned about a lingering struggle to educate, employ and fairly represent the increasingly diverse population of the suburban community just southeast of Houston.
“You have this engrained intolerance for people who are not the cookie-cutter idea of what old Pearland used to be,” said Mike Floyd, who was elected to the Pearland ISD board two years ago at age 18.
Pearland ISD officials did not respond to requests for comment last week.
When 13-year-old Juelz Trice arrived at Berry Miller Junior High with an “M”
shape shaved into his haircut last month, an administrator — later identified by parents and a district official as Assistant Principal Tony Barcelona — told the student that the design was a distraction and violated the school dress code. District officials said he was given three choices: Call his mother, receive a disciplinary action or color it in with a marker.
He “decided to color my baby’s design with a PERMANENT MARKER!” Trice’s mother, Angela Washington, wrote in a Facebook post. She added that the only options given to her son were “to go to (in-school suspension) or get his head colored. They did not call to inform me at all.”
Five days later, the permanent black ink was still on Juelz’s scalp.
“It should have been solved very easily. Call the parent and we’ll fix it,” Washington said last month. “He was humiliated. The look on his face when he got in the car, he was totally embarrassed.”
The school district put out a statement April 23 condemning the administrator’s actions and said he was placed on administrative leave. But the district had announced eight days earlier that Barcelona would be the new principal of Berry Miller Junior High School.
“I have a driven focus on excellence, maximizing student and teachers talents to create a successful, positive school environment,” Barcelona said, according to an April 15 news release announcing his promotion. More than 850 people have signed a change.org petition that calls Barcelona’s action “regrettable” but urges his reinstatement, citing his “years of stellar service.”
Also in April, Hadiya Henderson, a freshman at Dawson High School, was instructed by an assistant principal to get a note from her imam confirming that she wears her headscarf for religious reasons, the family said.
“Hadiya has worn her hijab since the fourth grade and we have never had a problem,” the girl’s mother, Luciana Brady-Henderson, told Dona Kim Murphey, a spokeswoman for families concerned about the climate in the 21,000-student district.
The parents of Hadiya and Juelz asserted that school district administrators had been unresponsive to their concerns.
The dress code for the current school year says students are not allowed to cover their heads, wear caps, hats or hair rollers inside school. Unlike the revised dress code for the coming school year, it does not mention religious exemptions, although Pearland ISD said in a Thursday news release that students wearing religious clothing are not required to bring notes.
“The district has a number of students who wear hijabs and other religious-related clothing every day,” the release read. “It is only when it is unclear that a student is wearing something for religiousrelated reasons that parents/students may be questioned as to why they are not in compliance with the dress code.”
Concerns about inclusion
Murphey, an Asian American physician, moved to Pearland with her family in 2004 because of how racially integrated the city was.
“There was a real opportunity for us to build a community across different cultures,” she said. “That was really beautiful for me, to raise my kids in that environment.”
But she soon realized that as diverse as Pearland was, it was disconnected.
The city has a reputation of being divided between the historic white population, mainly residing in the east side, and the rapidly growing minority populations settling in the west side.
From 2010 to 2017, Pearland’s population grew by nearly 31,000 to over 122,000 residents, according to census data. Included in that growth were more than 5,000 African Americans and nearly 4,000 Asian Americans.
“We’re growing in a way that most cities throughout the U.S. haven’t been — we’re growing very quickly, in different aspects,” said Dalia Kasseb, a Muslim American who ran for the City Council in 2017. “There has been a race against change. But my message has been, ‘Let’s appreciate one another and unify the goals of our community.’ ”
Yet despite the increasing diversity of the city, local offices remain controlled mostly by white men.
Pearland Mayor Tom Reid, 93, who has been mayor since 1995, staved off a 2017 challenge from Quentin Wiltz, a black man in his 30s. Kasseb, who wears the hijab, was defeated that year by Woody Owens, a former council member who, like Reid, is white.
The Pearland ISD staff is 60 percent white, compared with 38 percent of its student population. That has some community members concerned that discriminatory encounters will continue.
When Murphey was campaigning to become a school board member last month, she says, she spoke with about 1,000 families in the school district. Multiple families of color told her that they had left the school district due to similar discriminatory experiences.
In 2016, a black fifth-grader in the Pearland ISD alleged she was scolded for kneeling during the Pledge of Allegiance, as many NFL players have done to object to racism and police brutality. District officials denied those allegations and said the student was subsequently advised she could skip the pledge with written permission.
The district has also faced accusations of being discriminatory toward the LGBTQ community.
Kimberly Shappley, the mother of a transgender teen, told the Houston Chronicle last year that her family moved to Austin from Pearland because the school district was insensitive to her daughter’s gender identity.
“We’ve just been having trouble with other students telling her she can’t line up with girls because she’s a boy. It’s not the kids’ fault, they don’t understand,” Shappley said. “And Pearland ISD doesn’t want to educate them. It became too much.”
The district’s superintendent, John Kelly, waded into the political debate in 2016 when he criticized then-President Barack Obama’s administrative guidance that school districts should permit students to use bathrooms that conformed to their gender identity, even if it didn’t match the gender on their birth certificate.
And on par with statewide and national trends, Pearland ISD has disproportionate punishment rates for students of color.
Although there were more than twice as many white students (38.6 percent) as black students (15.9 percent) enrolled in the school district in the 2017-18 school year, black students were 2.3 times more likely to get in-school suspensions than their white peers during that period, and 2.5 times more likely to get out-ofschool suspensions, according to Texas Education Agency data. Floyd sees room for progress. “I think new Pearland is amazing,” said Floyd. “It has to be supported and protected or people are going to literally be forced out in some cases.”
Hope for change
In response to the concerns of parents, Pearland ISD released a statement Wednesday announcing changes to its dress code.
Restrictions on “hair styles and carvings” were removed, but distracting colors remain prohibited. The policy says head coverings such as hats, caps, bandannas and hair rollers remain banned, but “exceptions will be made for religious headwear.”
The new code is based on meetings of what the district called a diverse committee of principals, educators and parents.
“The committee and administration sought to simplify the current dress code, provide more versatility, and identify and remove any perceived racial, cultural and religious insensitivities,” the district said in a statement.
Charles Gooden Jr., president of the Pearland ISD school board, wrote on Facebook on May 14 in response to the haircut incident that the administration is looking to possibly expand diversity training, and establish “a committee of minority district leaders to look at issues around diversity and sensitivity.”
“These incidents have been bad,” Gooden said. “What we’re looking at in the future — the dress code changes that came out, the diversity committee we’re looking at seating — those things will be a very positive impact for all of our students. We’re seeing some cultural learning.”
Floyd said that while he’s happy with the changes, more needs to be done, starting with diversifying staff and administration. He said he believes the decision to name Barcelona as principal should be reconsidered.
Barcelona did not respond to requests for comment through the district.
But Kasseb said that the school district’s response to the issue is a positive step.
“In the past, they haven’t responded, they’ve taken the heat and just sat on it,” she said. “I realize there are still a lot more steps we need to take to be an inclusive government body, but we have to look at the positives.”
“I think new Pearland is amazing. It has to be supported and protected or people are going to literally be forced out in some cases.” Mike Floyd