I've recently seen news reports about a senior at a Louisiana High School who isn’t being allowed to walk at graduation or receive his diploma if he didn’t shave his beard. Andrew Jones is a student athlete with a 4.0 GPA which makes him the valedictorian of his 2016 class. Apparently the school holds a policy that the male students are not allowed to have facial hair. As graduation came closer 14 males, including Jones, were asked to shave their beards. He was the only one that refused to shave his facial hair but, as a compromise, Jones shaved off the hair on his cheeks but left his mustache and goatee.

After reading through several comments it became very clear that people were against Jones’s actions. Many commenters stated that “he needs to learn that there are rules” and “he’s a future dictator”. But my personal opinion is fairly different. Andrew Jones went to school for 4 years without this rule being enforced and not once was he asked to shave his beard at any moment prior to graduation. Because of a school's lack of ability to enforce rules in the first place, this senior was deprived of one of the most important moments in his life.

The situation would be understandable if Jones was a rebellious student who refused to take out his earphones that were blasting music and distracting his classmates. But, Andrew Jones was valedictorian, star athlete, and a college scholarship awardee that refused to cut off a natural part of himself. Jones’s facial hair wasn’t a distraction from his school work and didn’t serve as a distraction for his classmates. The schools policy is absurd but it’s even more ridiculous for such a successful student to be deprived of such a major moment in life.