Rebecca Klein, education editor of Huffington Post, writes here about a voucher school in Florida that rejected a black child because it didn’t approve of his dreadlocks.

The good news is that the ACLU and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund are fighting back, saying that the ban by the all-white staff serves no useful purpose.

In August, 6-year-old Clinton Stanley Jr. was kicked out of his new school before he even had a chance to step inside a classroom. Administrators at the Florida school didn’t approve of his hairstyle, which he wore in locs, and said he couldn’t return until he changed it.

Now the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and American Civil Liberties Union are filing a legal complaint with the state’s Department of Education, alleging that the private school’s hair policy is racially discriminatory. The complaint cites HuffPost data showing that it is not uncommon for private schools in the state to maintain hair policies with clear racist undertones.

The school in question ― A Book’s Christian Academy ― is private, but it participates in several of the state’s voucher programs, which provides publicly funded scholarships for kids to attend private schools based on factors like income. Clinton was supposed to attend A Book’s Christian Academy on one such scholarship.

But the American Civil Liberties Union and Legal Defense Fund complaint says that A Book’s policy is illegal, violating federal civil rights laws that schools in state voucher programs are required to follow.

“A Book’s ban on ‘dreads’ – a style that Black students are particularly likely to wear – does not advance any legitimate school objective,” says the complaint. “Therefore, A Book’s policy illegally discriminates against Black students.”