Alysha Cosby, an Alabama high-school student, was banned from participating in her school's graduation last night because she is pregnant.
So she announced her own name and walked across the stage anyway. (I love it!)
Cosby, her mother, and her aunt were then escorted out of the room by police.
Officials from St. Jude Educational Institute in Montgomery, Alabama told Cosby to stop attending the school in March, due to "safety concerns." She completed her courses at home. And even though she met all of the academic requirements and received her diploma, the school refused to recognize her at the ceremony.
The kicker? The father of Cosby's child-- a student at the same high school-- was allowed to graduate with the class.
"I can't believe something like this is happening in 2005. I feel like we have regressed instead of progressed," Cosby's mother told reporters.
Thanks to Patrick for the link.
1 TrackBacks
Listed below are links to blogs that reference this entry: As if teen moms don't have it hard enough....
TrackBack URL for this entry: http://www.feministing.com/cgi-bin/movabletype/mt-tb.fcgi/1964
Although the Roman Catholic School claims to have a policy of nondiscrimination, the pregnant student was not allowed even to attend classes during the last few months of the school year. Alysha Cosby was instead required to study at home, due to “safe... Read More
Weekly Feministing Newsletter
Feministing RSS Feed
stop attending the school in March, due to "safety concerns."
Ha! I guess we should all go back to the days of "confinement". It's safer and not nearly as offensive as public pregnancy.
While we are at it, let's go back to menses huts, so we can all go to the edge of the city once a month. I'll bring the ice cream and Buffy videos.
/end sarcasm
Perhaps, rather than viewing teen pregnancy as something shameful, they should work harder to prevent it. They can't have it both ways. Sex ed is anathema to these same people; they need to pull their heads out of their bibles and realize "just say no" never worked for as a cure for anything.
She announced her own name and walked across the stage? That is awesome!
I recall my own high school graduation. It was almost impossible to be excluded. You could plaigurise your way through senior year and still walk across that stage..but if they saw you wearing the wrong shoes on graduation day, they would not allow you to walk even if you were the valedictorian.
I strongly suspect that this was all about image. They did not want to show a pregnant student walking across that stage. It would make the school look bad, don't you know.
I think it does make the school look bad. and the community, and the young people involved. Doesn't anyone have a sense of shame anymore? or is shame an outmoded, patriachial value that is no longer needed by our modern sensitive society?
Misused public shame accounts for some of history's worst crimes. Crippled Soviet vets from WWII were shipped to Gulag-like isolation villages because their war wounds were shameful.
And how on earth do you defend allowing the father to walk? Is shame the woman's burden, but not the man's? That's barbaric.
I am not sure why that would be shameful, T. So if two 16 yr. olds got married and she got pregnant, that wouldn't be shameful? Is it the age or the unmarried part you find so disturbing?
Tf, you're right. That girl should wallow in shame even as the boy should not, because hey, sex is a right of boys if not girls. Plus, that shame will be useful when the child is born, because every time he misbehaves, she can tell him that having him ruined her life.
Actually, I am really coming around to supporting bringing back the stocks so Tf and friends can get their shaming out with tomatoes and the women convicted of having sex can get their punishment over in a couple of hours instead of having it be this dragged out thing.
Shame, and the attendant accountabiilty.
I'm for it. But not for piddly shit like sex. Here's the part that amuses me. This young woman could have avoided the shame. All she needed to do was get an abortion.
I'll wager though, that tfreridge would have been against that too.
So I have little sympathy for that argument (that the girl ought to be publically shamed for having acted like a teenager, when she was teenaged).
What, I wonder, was the safety issue which made it needful to deny her the participation in something she had earned? I can see, perhaps, that for some reason continuing to have her in school might have jeapordized her, or the baby's, health, but one evening in the auditorium? The walk up the steps to the stage? The walk down the steps?
No.
She did the work, she ought to get the reward, it's only fair, and just and proper.
TK
So here's the email address of St. Jude's. Father Mathew Sindik is the Director of The City of Saint Jude's, which is where the school is located. I just let him know how I felt, why don't you?
info@stjudeei.org
Send Father Mathew Sindik your thoughts on his school's policy. He's the Director of City of St. Jude, where the school's located. The email address is info@stjudeei.org.
Email your concerns and comments to the St. Jude's Education Institute in Montgomery, Alabama at: info@stjudeei.org
Here's the scoop. It's the original article in the Montgomery Advertiser. The link is
http://www.montgomeryadvertiser.com/ NEWSV5/storyV5stjudegrad29w.htm
Makes this girl look like what she is - a good kid. Makes the school look like what it is, too. As a Catholic, I'm ashamed and appalled by what the administration did, but not surprised. And sadly, I don't think many other schools, secular or parochial, would have done anything different. Women who "transgress" will always be punished, and the men who do the same are patted on the back for "being boys".
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly with Tf. I mean, no way should this girl not be publically shamed!
The scorn and disappointment she's received so far from every adult she knows and trusts, the stares of every person she passes on the street, getting kicked out of school, and the derision of all of her classmates is probably not quite enough to REALLY bring home that particular point. I totally agree that she should watch, quietly, as the guy who got her pregnant gets his rocks off (again).
She knows shame. And she knows how to do what's right anyway, a hell of a lot earlier than I did.
And you know what? It's been ten years since I was in her shoes, and everyone who has been through my (large) high school since then still knows who I am.
You think we don't know SHAME? Beg, rent, or steal a clue.
At my high school (I graduated in 1997), pregnant students were not allowed to take the same classes as the rest of us. They were shunted off into a special class, held in a portable classroom in the very back of campus, where they studied together, regardless of abilities/interests. My high school had three regular lunch periods. The pregnant girls didn't even get to eat with us; they kept the cafeteria open an extra fourth-lunch session for the pregnant girls and the students in in-school-suspension (kind of like a daytime detention program for kids who got in trouble at school). The pregnant girls were thus ostracized socially, equated with the "bad" kids, and limited in their educational opportunities. And of course, there was essentially no sex-ed at my high school....
This is why childbearing should be covered by something resembling the Americans with Disabilities Act. No public building should be "unsafe" for pregnant women. Without the "safety concerns" excuse to trot out, the school would have to show its true colors.
I don't quite understand what safety concerns they mean. It's not as if they'd be letting her play footy, is it? What kind of dangers could a high school posess for a pregnant woman? Miscarriage-inducing meatloaf?