What happens when a young student at an elementary school gets a “high-and-tight” haircut to honor his stepbrother — an active-duty soldier? He gets showered with a heap of support and praise, right? Unfortunately, that’s not what happened in the case of Adam Stinnett, a student at Bobby Ray Memorial Elementary School in McMinnville, Tennessee.

Instead, quite the opposite occurred. For his new hairdo, he was written up — disciplined by the principal of the school. Crazy, right? The administrator cited a rule banning “mohawk haircuts or other extreme cuts”. The one Stinnett donned to make his older sibling proud — Army Specialist Justin Bloodworth — apparently broke this policy.

Despite the principal’s condemnation, the young boy relented, and came into school the next day with the haircut unchanged. This lead to a “face-to-face” between his mother and the school official, the result of which was shaving Stinnett’s head. “I did shave his head,” Adam’s mother, Amy Stinnett told the Army Times Thursday. “With no hair, he looks sick all the time.” “They crushed my son’s dreams,” she said of the school officials. “They made him feel upset. They broke his heart. He didn’t deserve that.”

Upset by the school’s handling of the situation, Amy Stinnett took to getting the word out to various media sources about her son’s trouble. And oh, did it get out. A local Fox TV affiliate covered it, followed by a piece in a local newspaper, followed by traffic and traction on Facebook. Pretty soon, it had gone from this small town 90 minutes from Nashville to national news. It eventually even got the Warren County Board of Education to react. They put out a statement on Wednesday that said that “neither Bobby Ray Memorial Elementary, nor any school in the Warren County School District, prohibits military haircuts”.

According to school officials, the “policy” is now currently under review. Perhaps, the biggest irony about the entire debacle is that Bobby Ray Memorial Elementary School is named after David Robert “Bobby” Ray — Navy Hospital Corpsman 2nd Class David Robert “Bobby” Ray — who was awarded the Medal of Honor posthumously for his actions with a Marine Corps unit during a 1969 battle near An Hoa, Vietnam. The school’s gymnasium is also named after a military veteran: Spc. Jeremy L. Brown, who was killed in Afghanistan in 2010 when his unit was attacked by small-arms fire. USA Today