The principle of Chattooga High School in Summerville Georgia, had ordered four pages to be cut out of the 2009 yearbook, because there were photographs of shirtless males playing basketball that he said were inappropriate.
When I first read this I was thinking did they really pull four pages out of a yearbook because some guys didn’t have shirts on??
“She looked at (the book), saw the pictures, brought it to my attention and removed them,” Lenderman said, speaking on behalf of the adviser. “They did not represent the way we want our school portrayed, and the way the community values itself. If it was my son or daughter, it would not be something I would want in there. This is a course for the students.”
The photos of the men were part of a “summer activities” spread for the student life section. It was routinely hard to get the photos; they need to be taken over the summer when school is not in session. The student that took these was able to take pictures of his classmates playing basketball in a church gym. “I was with them playing basketball,” Barker said. “I had the camera with me so I just started taking pictures.”
I would have done the same thing if I was at an open gym for gymnastics and had my camera I would start taking photos to.
Barker who took the photos was upset so he decided to ask why they removed the photos. The new yearbook advisor told him that in one of the photos a male student was smiling and holding a cell phone and dollar bills, which had drug-related implications.
The page removal caused a number of complaints; the yearbook staff got a number of e-mails from angry students. It wasn’t the yearbook’s fault that the photos got pulled, so the student’s shouldn’t be upset with them.
“Everyone who’s seen them says there is nothing offensive here,” Perry said. “If you look back at all the yearbooks over the years, we’ve always had shirtless boys in them. And this year’s book also had some pictures from the chorus musical, and there were some shirtless boys in that play, and their pictures were in the yearbook.” Perry scanned all four of the missing photos of the book and posted them on his Facebook account for his students to see.
I think the whole thing was really dumb. I do not get how shirtless guys holding a cell phone and dollar bills would implicate drugs in any way. If they didn’t want shirtless males in the yearbook maybe they should have said something before hand, so they would know not to take shirtless photos. I think if they let the musical have a photo with a shirtless guy they should let some guy’s hanging out in the summer playing basketball. It would be just like if the yearbook staff took photos of the school basketball team practicing, or if they got photos of the gym class when they did a swimming lesson. I think it was a poorly made choice, especially for the photographer. He worked hard trying to get photos during the summer so that hey students at the school will have a nice yearbook. I think this is a terrible thing that happened and they should try and avoid it next time, maybe have better communication with the yearbook staff because they are the ones doing all the work.
Lindsay McKnight
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