‘Bye, Felicia’: Pascagoula school bans flip shirt honoring dead seniors

Published 8:50 am Monday, December 10, 2018

PASCAGOULA, Miss. (AP) — A Mississippi high school has banned students from wearing a class t-shirt that lists the names of three seniors who died this year and the dismissive phrase “Bye, Felicia.”

Some Pascagoula High School seniors and their parents were enraged after receiving the senior class T-shirts. The controversy began when parents and students started receiving the T-shirts on Thursday.

By Friday morning, parents and students had taken to Facebook to express their outrage over the use of the phrase on a senior class T-shirt that also memorializes deceased seniors Blayze M. Broadus, Jonathan McCommon and Matthew Russell Parker. Broadus and McCommon died in a car accident.

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Pascagoula School Superintendent Wayne Rodolfich on Friday banned the shirts from school property and events. Students on Thursday started receiving the shirts that featured the phrase first used by Ice Cube in the 1999 film “Friday” as a cold way to say goodbye.

Pascagoula High School administrators, staff and students designed the shirts. Rodolfich says the seniors’ names were probably included in an effort to honor them, but were not in the design that had been approved.

He says the school district will be paying for the students to get new senior class shirts.