A student at Lower Merion High School in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says they were not allowed to fully participate in their graduation ceremony because they were wearing a headscarf that has become a symbol for Palestinians.<\/p>\n
The student, Evan, said they showed up for the ceremony last Thursday in a keffiyeh-patterned headscarf.<\/p>\n
According to Evan’s post on Instagram, school officials said the colors were a “political statement.” The post says the student was pulled aside and told to take it off because it would cause a disruption.<\/p>\n
Evan said they were eventually allowed to return for a portion of the graduation after removing the headscarf.<\/p>\n
In a statement to CBS News Philadelphia, the Lower Merion School District said it sent guidelines to seniors and their families weeks before graduation.<\/p>\n
The guidelines included not wearing attire with political messages that would distract from the purpose of the ceremony, the Lower Merion School District said.<\/p>\n
The Philadelphia chapter of the Council on American-Islamic Relations condemned the schools’ actions and said in a statement in part that the incident is a “clear violation of students’ rights to free expression, and a troubling example of racial and political profiling.”<\/p>\n
The Lower Merion School District said students were given a choice between removing items that violated their guidance and participating in the ceremony, or not removing them and not participating.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A student at Lower Merion High School in Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, says they were not allowed to fully…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2849,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[183,185,184,186,200,2510],"class_list":["post-2848","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-lower-merion","tag-lower-merion","tag-lower-merion-headlines","tag-lower-merion-news","tag-lower-merion-township","tag-montgomery-county","tag-palestinians"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2848"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2848\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2849"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2848"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2848"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-pa\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2848"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}