Native American boy suspended from school for long hair, ACLU steps into La. case

(CBS/AP) NEW ORLEANS - Long hair led a 13-year-old native American boy to get suspended from a Louisiana junior high school, but the American Civil Liberties Union says the Houma Indian teen who grows his hair long for cultural and religious reasons was suspended illegally.

ACLU executive director Marjorie Esman says Seth Chaisson was suspended March 15 and 16 from Juban Park Junior High in Denham Springs. The ACLU wants a guarantee that he can stay, with reprimands and discipline erased from his record. He was allowed back in the Livingtston Parish school last Thursday.

Esman says the boy has the same right to long hair that a Christian student has to wear a cross or a Jewish boy to wear a yarmulke to school.

Esman said Chaisson "is becoming more in tune with his own religious beliefs. Just as a junior high school student might decide to wear a cross that they had never wanted to wear before,

he has now decided to grow his hair out in a way he had never decided to do before."

Ed Foster, supervisor of child welfare and attendance for the Livingston Parish School System, says he has scheduled a meeting Friday with the teen's mother.