A California teen has been struggling through high school with a brain tumor, pushing through his studies against all odds, but triumphantly making it through regardless.
After all of his unfathomable challenges, prom was the one event he was looking forward to, but he wasn’t given the chance when he was kicked out before he even got there.
Jared Springer had his tux picked out and a pink tie to go with it, to coordinate with his date who he just asked to go with him.
Both he and the female friend he invited were excited and ready to go, when Jared was handed some sickening news from administrators about why he was banned from the event.
The 18-year-old Arroyo Grande High School student was first diagnosed with the brain tumor a year and a half ago, when he was in his junior year. He’s since suffered paralysis from it and is wheelchair bound, which was only made worse when he fell from his chair and broke his hip recently.
Jared was immediately sent into emergency surgery, which kept him out of school for six weeks to recover. While on bed rest, he did his schoolwork and managed to maintain great grades. However, all of that wasn’t good enough for Arroyo Grande administrators.
Having gotten to the end of his ordered bed rest time, he was still excited to go to the prom, but district officials canceled his plans, saying he wasn’t allowed to go since he had missed so much school, despite having continued his courses at home.
“School policy says that since Jared had to miss school and do school at home and not physically go, he wouldn’t be able to go to attend extracurricular functions or activities,” Lori Springer, Jared’s mother, said, according to KSBY. “I was just hoping he could do something fun.”
Jared said he really wanted to go this year. He couldn’t the year before, since he was in the hospital during the time of the dance. However, none of that mattered to the school when he and his mother explained the extremely heartbreaking circumstances, hoping they would reverse their decision and make this incredibly important exception to the rule. In the end, they stuck to the rules and released a statement after to justify banning a cancer-stricken student from going to a dance.
“In order to protect all our students and staff, we have specific rules about who is allowed to participate in school-sponsored events,” the statement read in part. The notice did add that to make up for the prom experience, they are open to discussing his attendance at upcoming extracurricular activities. That still doesn’t afford this kid the rite of passage of the prom that was already robbed from him.
Rules are always changed for the wrong reasons, but never the legitimate causes such as this. You can bet that if this about a joint-gender bathroom, the district would have allowed it, but because a kid missed school from consequences of his cancer, that’s when the system decides to pull out the “rules are rules” card. His true pain and suffering should matter more.
