A Michigan elementary school librarian accused of a “modern-day scalping” for cutting a biracial girl’s hair will get to keep her job, district officials said, finding that she didn’t act with racial bias.
Mount Pleasant Public Schools launched an investigation into the incident from March, when Jurnee Hoffmeyer, 7, came home in tears after the librarian cut off her curly locks.
“It’s clear from the third-party investigation and the district’s own internal investigation that MPPS employees had good intentions when performing the haircut,” school board officials said in a statement Friday, MLive.com reported. “Regardless, their decisions and actions are unacceptable and show a major lack of judgment. The employees involved have acknowledged their wrong actions and apologized.”
The district said the librarian, who is white, did not act with racial bias — but it did place the unnamed employee on a “last chance” employment agreement, meaning any future infraction will likely result in her termination.
“We believe a last chance agreement is appropriate given that the employee has an outstanding record of conduct and has never once been reprimanded in more than 20 years of work at MPPS,” the Mount Pleasant Public Schools Board of Education said.
The 7-year-old girl, Jurnee Hoffmeyer, returned to her Mount Pleasant home in March with most of her hair on one side of her head chopped off.
She told her father a white classmate had snipped her locks while on a bus, prompting him to take her to a barber for a new asymmetrical look.
But Jurnee returned home in tears from Ganiard Elementary School two days later after a librarian cut her hair again, leaving behind just a few inches of her curly locks.
Two other school employees were aware of the incident but didn’t report it. They received written reprimands, district officials said.
Jurnee’s father, Jimmy Hoffmeyer, pulled his daughter out of the school following the haircut. She’s now taking classes elsewhere, MLive reported.
An investigation into the incident included interviews with district staff, students and their families, as well as a review of video, photographic evidence and social media posts, district officials said.
But Jimmy Hoffmeyer, who is black and white, told the Associated Press neither he nor his daughter were questioned as part of the review.
“Who did they talk to?” Hoffmeyer reportedly asked Friday. “Did they really do an investigation?”
Jurnee’s mom is white.
A message seeking additional comment from MPPS Superintendent Jennifer Verleger was not immediately returned Monday.
A staffer for the National Parents Union, a network of groups and activists advocating on behalf children, equated the March haircutting incidents to a “modern-day scalping” while insisting they were racially motivated.
The organization accused district officials of giving the librarian a “slap on the wrist” while claiming her actions will lead to “lifelong trauma” for Jurnee.
“A white employee and white administrators being investigated by a nearly all-white school board who hired an unknown ‘independent investigator’ is not an appropriate lens by which to evaluate this situation,” NPU officials said in a statement to MLive.com. “Jurnee must and will have justice.”
Census figures show that just 4 percent of Mount Pleasant’s 25,000 residents are black.
NPU’s Midwest delegate, Bernita Bradley, told MLive.com in April that Jurnee didn’t have the “same spark in her smile” following the incidents.
“Jurnee feels infiltrated,” Bradley said. “Her whole demeanor is different.”
