The AP has a story today about a kid in Louisiana who was sent home from school for wearing an Indianapolis Colts jersey.

A Louisiana high school student says he was sent home for wearing an Indianapolis Colts jersey Friday — the day the principal encouraged students to wear New Orleans Saints black and gold as the teams get ready to face off in the Super Bowl.

Sending a student home for making a poor clothing choice isn’t necessarily something to get worked up over. And I really don’t like professional sports — there’s something appealing about having a dress code against wearing clothes that prominently display the names of sports corporations, especially those that cost the taxpayers of their particular state millions of dollars. That’s a good lesson in economics for the kids.

But, no. As you can see from the paragraph above, the principal encouraged students to wear clothing that promoted another major sports corporation that is costing the taxpayers of Louisiana millions of dollars.

The kid was wearing the wrong freaking colors. Oh, and there is a dress code, as it turns out; it was just relaxed:

A Livingston Parish School Board member said [Brandon] Frost wasn’t sent home, but was told he couldn’t wear the blue jersey at school. Keith Martin, whose district includes Maurepas, said the school uniform had been relaxed only for black and gold.

This jerk principal “relaxed” the dress code so that the students could show their proper fealty to a sports corporation that is costing taxpayers in Louisiana millions of dollars. What kind of lesson is this school corporation trying to impart?

The lesson is, Love your sports corporation:

Brandon Frost said [Principal Steven] Vampran called him out of his first class Friday and told him, “I don’t recall saying you could wear a Colts jersey on Black-and-Gold Day.”

He said he told the principal that his father had given him permission to go home if it was a problem.

“He started to get angry with me,” Frost said. “I thought I remember him saying, ‘If you like Indiana so much, why don’t you go back?”’

Vampran has acknowledged that he should not have said that, Martin said. He said no one sent Frost home – but no one kept him from leaving rather than changing shirts.

The principal told the kid who was wearing a Colts jersey to move back to Indiana if he liked it so much. The principal.

The principal told the kid to leave town because he is a fan of a rival sports corporation.

Again, this bears repeating: The principal of a school told one of the students at that school to get the hell out of the state because he is a fan of a sports corporation that has a money-losing stadium in another city.

And after telling his student that he should go back to Indiana, the principal then said, You don’t have to go home to change out of your Colts jersey,  but you do have to change out of your Colts jersey.

Here’s something I never thought I’d write: I’m with the kid in the Colts jersey.  Good for him for not submitting to principal pressure.

And what kind of education is this kid missing out on, when he’s sent home? I note that, according to a press release from the Louisiana Department of Education, Louisiana ranks — well, it ranks very poorly:

For 2009, Louisiana once again finished 47th in its ranking of student achievement and moved up from a 2008 ranking of 50th to 48th in the category designed to measure a child’s chance for success, including parental education and income. However, the state ranks number two in how it measures education progress and number six in its programs to improve teacher quality.

For actual student achievement, Louisiana ranks 47 and 48. Oh, but for how it measures “education progress” (whatever that means) and on programs to improve teacher quality (those programs are obviously doing quite well, by the way), the state is way up there. It’s only too bad that there is no measure for “showing how much we love our sports teams.” No doubt Louisiana would rank very high indeed by that measure.

The kid in the Colts jersey is probably better off being sent home.

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Ricky Sprague

Ricky Sprague occasionally writes and/or draws things. He sometimes animates things. He has a Twitter account and he has a blog. He scripted this graphic novel about Kolchak The Night Stalker. He is really, really good at putting links in bios.

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