5 year old boy wins right to wear turban to school in Australia
A Sikh family in Australia won a legal battle against a Christian school which refused to enroll their five-year-old son because of his turban.
Sidhak Singh Arora, the child was due to start preparatory classes at Melton Christian College (MCC) in Melbourne’s north-west this year. But his ‘patka’ did not come across as a part of the school uniform policy. The uniform policy prohibits students from wearing any type of religious head covering.
Sagardeep Singh Arora father and his wife Anureet (mother of the child) said the school breached the Equal Opportunity Act by not allowing Sidhak to wear a ‘patka’ when they tried to enroll him in 2016, as per reports.
The Victorian Civil and Administrative Tribunal (VCAT) ruled in the parents’ favour, finding the school had discriminated against Sidhak, it said.
“Whilst MCC is a Christian school, it has an open enrolment policy, that is - accepting enrolments of students from other faiths,” VCAT member Julie Grainger found. “A little over 50 per cent of the school community does not identify explicitly as Christian and many families at the school have no religious beliefs,” the report said.
“It is not reasonable to accept enrollment applications from students from non-Christian faiths only on the condition that they do not look like they practice a non-Christian religion,” it said.
Grainger ordered the parents and the school to sit down and negotiate an agreement on what orders can be made to resolve the situation.
-PTC News
