The Robesonian started receiving phone calls mid-morning on Monday from parents, perhaps a half a dozen or so, who were angry because they said their children were being sent home from Fairmont High School for what has to be at worst a misdemeanor, wearing an all-white or all-black shirt.

Skeptical, we began doing the reporting, forever difficult with the Public Schools of Robeson County, which is always reticent in providing information because, it seems to us, everyone is worried that they are one wrong word away from the unemployment line. The consequence is the school system allows others to shape the narrative.

The narrative that was being shaped on Monday was that students were being suspended for what they were wearing, although the school systems says no one was suspended. One student who apparently had to change shirts was wearing a T-shirt celebrating Relay for Life, the event that is held annually in Robeson County to fight cancer, and had lost his mother to that horrible disease. Some parents said they were taking a change of clothing to their child, and we learned later that the school was also providing some shirts to students.

Still, not exactly a home run on the PR front.

It took awhile for the truth to emerge, but when it did, it played to the benefit of school officials at Fairmont High, especially its principal, Kent Prater. It was disappointing and expected that we never spoke directly with Prater — what information we get comes slowly, if at all, from the central office — but there was a a letter on the school’s website that he wrote to parents explaining what was going on.

Prater said school officials had gotten wind of — here we have to use that four-letter word that makes the central office cringe — gang-related activity that would include the wearing of white T-shirts, not black ones, to school on Monday. So Prater acted forcefully and told students to leave their white T-shirts at home on Monday. The lesson that was learned was that information was not communicated to parents in advance, so they had no context when their children called and said that wearing all white to school was suddenly not all right.

But we commend Prater for laying down some law; if there is something that we should all be able to agree upon when it comes to our public schools, it’s that too little discipline is being dished out, not too much.

Tuesday went by uneventfully, and as this is being written on a Wednesday, we are not aware of any additional problems.

Our central office needs to understand that this newspaper specifically and the media in general can be an ally. If information had been provided to us early on about exactly what was happening, and not dished out in small and unappetizing bites, some of which was later retracted, then we could have provided the following information to the parents and done it sooner: Fairmont High School was being diligent in trying to keep you children safe.