Via the Blaze, I’m always weirdly impressed in stories like this one, or the ones where some kid gets suspended for biting his Pop Tart into the shape of a gun or whatever, by the sheer perseverance of the school administrators. Even if they’re such unholy hard-asses that they’d prefer to enforce the letter of the law against well-meaning naifs, you would think the looming PR disaster in doing so would warn them away from it. Simple self-interest in the Facebook age dictates that you don’t kick a five-year-old out of school for going “bang bang” with his breakfast pastry, even if you want to, and you certainly don’t bring down the hammer on a kid who’s trying to ease the suffering of a classmate who has cancer. Imagine you’re the principal, having just read this quote in the paper, and deciding that this head-shaving punk needs to sweat it out for awhile:

Kamryn decided to have a big makeover — shaving off all of her hair in solidarity with a friend who was starting chemotherapy to treat cancer.

“I was really excited I would have somebody to support me and I wouldn’t be alone with people always laughing at me. I would at least have somebody to go through it all,” says Delaney, who just began chemotherapy.

Game, set, match, right? Time to cave! Nope: Kamryn was forced to spend Monday on the playground instead of in class because school rules ban shaved heads in the name of “safety, uniformity, and a non-distracting environment for the school’s students.” Then, after a wholly predictable firestorm online yesterday, the school finally did cave (turns out there are exceptions to the dress code in “extraordinary circumstances”) and let her back in today. The school’s board of directors is meeting within the next hour or two to decide the important question of whether classroom decorum can survive having two bald girls in class instead of one. How will this completely unnecessary publicity trainwreck end? The suspense mounts, my friends.

What if, against all odds, the board upholds the suspension, forcing Kamryn to stay home until her hair grows back? I bet some extreme law-and-order types would appreciate that, albeit with misgivings about an unduly heavy sentence. Rules are rules, damn it.