Catholic School Withholds Diploma Over Girl's Footwear Choice [UPDATED]

Before graduation, Rachel says, the school sent out an email mandating a similarly strict dress code: No “casual shoes,” no sandals, and skirts or dresses for the women, plus close-cropped hair for the men. But she didn’t figure anyone would really notice or care, given that everyone was wearing long robes. Her mother says school administrators even threatened to bring a razor and shave any man who wasn’t sufficiently clean-shaven, but everyone figured they were either joking or exaggerating.

Rachel wasn’t able to get her cap and gown until she served four more hours of detention for a previous pink sock offense. She finished that on Friday, and was finally given her cap and gown Friday evening. She showed up for graduation Sunday morning, wearing sneakers.

Her mother, who asked that we not use her name, also packed a pair of flats: “I told her, ‘If they give you any guff, just come change.’” Rachel didn’t have to: she lined up for graduation and, along with her classmates, passed a cursory visual inspection before the ceremony began. She crossed the stage, shook hands with Paul VI’s administrators, and was handed a fake, ceremonial diploma.

With everyone else, she went backstage afterwards to get the real thing. But then, the principal, Virgina Colwell, the assistant principal Eileen Hanley, and a third administrator she didn’t recognize pulled her out of line, she says.

“You’re not getting your diploma,” Hanley told her. “You know you shouldn’t have worn those shoes.”

Rachel pointed out she’d passed “inspection” and begged for her diploma. The administrators refused, and she ran outside crying.

Rachel’s mother says she went inside, confronted Hanley, and demanded her daughter’s diploma, pointing out that they’d had nearly an hour before the ceremony to ask her to change.

“This is a kid wearing sneakers,” Rachel’s mother, clearly exasperated, tells Jezebel. “Not a kid flipping the audience off. This is a good kid. She graduated fine, she did volunteer work. This is everything you’d want a kid to be. But I guess they just took her sneakers very personally.” (None of the three administrators who supposedly withheld the diploma responded to interview requests from Jezebel. They were contacted by phone and email.)

Rachel’s mother says she was told that her daughter wouldn’t get her diploma until she did a day of detention over the summer. When she sent a follow-up email expressing her outrage and disappointment, a school administrator told her, she says “We’re going to have to agree to disagree,” and said they were still holding on to a diploma from 2010 that someone never picked up.

Rachel’s mother says there’s “no way” Rachel will do detention.

“Nope,” she says. “She’s done. They’ll get her in the there and if I’m not around they’re going to berate her.”

Rachel watched two boys in her homeroom class wear sneakers all year in long, in defiance of the school’s dress code. The night before graduation, during a class party, she says she saw a classmate getting an airbrushed temporary tattoo “of a confederate flag.” But sneakers were evidently a step too far.

“I was looking forward to getting my diploma for years,” she says sadly. “But I was in the car bawling instead. They ruined that moment for me.”

Update, 12:05 p.m.: Rachel and her mother say they received a phone call an email this morning from Assistant Principal and Dean of Students Patrick McGroarty. They say McGroarty told them that Paul VI will also withhold Rachel’s transcript until she completes her sneaker detention. Rachel graduated with honors and has been accepted to a university which her family requested we not identify by name. Without a transcript, though, she could have trouble enrolling classes.

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