Policy at Oregon school raises some eyebrows

PORTLAND – One Portland school is telling some students to shave their eyebrows or go home.

Several students at Centennial High School have picked up on a trend to shave lines into their eyebrows. They say it’s a fashion statement; school administrators, however, contend it’s a gang sign.

Centennial administrators are telling students who shave the lines that they can’t return to school until they take care of the problem – by shaving their eyebrows off. Four students have been sent home. One came back immediately with a bandage covering the shaved brow. The others are still out of school.

Andy Gonzalez, a junior at Centennial, was studying for a test when a security guard approached him and told him to go home. He told the teenager that the vertical line down his brow looked like a gang symbol and said, “If you’re going to come to school like that, don’t come at all.”

Gonzalez, 17, says he isn’t in a gang and shaved the lines to look cool and impress girls. But he says he’d be humiliated if he had to shave his brows off.

Centennial implemented the rules about the eyebrows after other area high schools, including Gresham, did.

But other schools say their policy is different: They only look for the markings that indicate affiliation with Southside 13, a prominent Latino gang in the area, and would not send students home for other shavings. If students did shave the symbols into their eyebrows, Gresham administrators say they would ask them to fill in the marks with an eyebrow pencil.

Centennial students say they are getting conflicting messages about what is allowed and when they can return. They also say officials have not announced the rules.