In the first of what could well become a regular DCist feature, administrators in a Charles County, Md. school refused to allow a student to graduate while wearing a bolo, a string tie common to Native Americans, pictured at right. Thomas Benya, a 17 year-old of Cherokee descent, was denied his diploma as punishment for not following the official graduation dress code — for girls, white dresses with white blouses; for boys, dark dress pants, white dress shirts, and a tie.

A school spokesman defended the decision, stating:

We have many students with many different cultural heritages, and there are many times to display that. But graduation is a time when we have a formal, uniform celebration. If kids are going to participate, they need to respect the rules. There is nothing that requires us to follow everyone’s different cultures.

This may well serve as a lesson to the school, which found that the best way to attract un-necessary attention and scrutiny is to do something as bone-headed as forbidding the use of a string tie for the sake of tradition-based uniformity. While this may not be as bad as the school officials who suspended a Georgia student for wearing a Pepsi shirt on “Coke Day” or the Arkansas boy who was removed from school for threateningly pointing a chicken finger at a classmate, it ranks up there in the slap-yourself-on-the-forehead-and-wonder-how-these-people-came-to-positions-of-authority category.