By Mac Cimmarrusti ’16 | Staff Writer

It is bitter cold outside as I walk into school, hair sopping wet. On top of that I have every administrator and hall monitor in the school running at me attempting to strip me of my only source of warmth for my cold head.

It is a safety concern according to certain administrators, but it’s just a hat, a beanie, an article of clothing that does not conceal my face in any way. How can that be a liability to those around me. It seems like the only person by wearing a hat is me, and that is only because I have taken off the beanie, thus exposing myself to contracting a head cold.

I am not a distraction with a hat. If anything, a bad hair day attracts more attention than someone hiding the bird’s nest they call hair. Everyone has off days where they roll out of bed late but don’t have any absences to spare, so they rush to school seven minutes before 8 a.m.

In those times of crisis, there is not a moment where I have time to fix the creature that just crawled out of the underworld into a decent looking high school student. A sports cap or winter beanie helps me mask the monster that woke up that torturous morning.

` I know teachers around the building are scared of students using hats at school as an excuse to stop showering for weeks on end, as disgusting as that may sound. However, if kids are set on not showering, regardless of any hat rule, they will continue to ruin the pleasantness that contributes to our classroom atmosphere.

And if this disturbing idea became a problem, a simple solution would be to make the kid shower, or call the student’s parents. With every new idea there are always possible consequences, but students not cleaning themselves seems like a far fetched idea and could be stopped quite easily.

But the worst excuse for not letting students wear hats is an administration who does not want to represent friend groups strolling around the hallways sporting the same lid, thus sparking “gang” interactions.

Frankly, this is not east L.A. We don’t have the Bloods and Crips. This is Grosse Pointe. We have the Sperrys and the Lulu Lemons.

In four years of high school I have yet to see a group of students who could intimidate a church mouse. There is most definitely gang violence in high schools across the United States. However the thought that hats could provoke gang loyalty at South is ludicrous.

According to AP US teacher James Fenimore Cooper, the United States Constitution gives schools a right to inflict a hat policy on students.

However, taking the right away from students to keep themselves warm from cold hair and safe from the emotional torture that is bad hair, is just wrong.