Students, parents bare claws over dress codes

It took only an hour for parents in Omaha, Neb., to get in touch with the American Civil Liberties Union. Their children — 23 of them — had been suspended from school for wearing the wrong clothes.

The teenagers, all students at Millard South High School, were ordered to stay home from one to three days in late August for wearing T-shirts that memorialized Julius Robinson, 18, a Millard South football player who was shot to death in June. The shirts were being sold to help raise money so Robinson’s family could buy a headstone for his grave.

Robinson was “just a really good guy,” said Dan Kuhr, a friend who designed the shirts. “He didn’t cause a lot of trouble.”

But to officials of the Millard Public Schools, the words “Julius RIP” on the shirts were disruptive. After consulting with Omaha police, they also said the shirts could be considered gang-related.

‘All I'm trying to do is ... respect my friend’
“I’m pretty upset — all I’m trying to do is, like, respect my friend,” said Patzy Van Beek, a junior at the school. “It’s not fair. People can wear ‘rest in peace, Grandma,’ but when it come to Julius, now all of a sudden we can’t have that at our school. I feel like no one cares.”

After the parents of several of the suspended students got in contact with the ACLU, the organization referred the case to its board of directors for possible legal action and sent a letter to the district, saying: “Going back to school shouldn’t mean sacrificing free speech rights at the schoolhouse door.”

That notion is at the heart of similar disputes across the country. As dress codes and  mandatory school uniform policies become more commonplace, students and parents are ending up in courtrooms and jailhouses in their determination to fight back:

• Gina Castillo, of Lawrence, Mass., and her 16-year-old son were charged with resisting arrest and assault and battery on a police officer after Castillo confronted officials at Lawrence High School this month. Administrators had suspended the boy, who was not identified because he is a juvenile, for a “uniform matter,” forcing him to miss three days of classes and an important test.

School officials called police when Castillo got into a heated argument with the school’s safety officer about the uniform policy. When officers arrived, they told her she would be arrested if she did not leave. According to police, Castillo responded, “Arrest me.” Her son was arrested when he tried to intervene.

Dozens of parents, saying school officials had gone overboard in this and other incidents, showed up at at a meeting of the School Committee last week to call for a change in the dress code.

• Last month, Shabraia Dodd, 15, was charged with assault on a police officer after she was arrested for wearing a jacket to East Ridge High School in East Ridge, Tenn. Shabraia acknowledged that she was in violation of the dress code, which prohibits wearing jackets in class, but she said she was recovering from a cold and had offered to remove the jacket after class.

She said she refused to be handcuffed “because I didn’t commit any crime.”

• And at North High School in Akron, Ohio, dozens of students were suspended earlier this month after nearly 100 challenged the dress code by wearing hooded sweatshirts. A spokeswoman for the Akron Public Schools District said most of the students agreed to take their hoodies off when faced with discipline, but more than 30 refused and were sent home for insubordination.

Taking on gangs by taking on gang symbolism
Dress codes are supposed to reduce violence and bullying by taking style differences out of the equation, according to the National Association of Elementary School Principals. Since the Clinton administration, the Education Department has encouraged schools to go further by adopting uniforms, saying they promote safety and discipline.

Jane E. Workman and Beth Winfrey-Freeburg of Southern Illinois University found that gang-related headwear was the No. 1 target of dress codes and uniform requirements, cited in 89 percent of the more than 80 school policies they reviewed in 2006. Jackets were second, cited in 64 percent of policies, because they can bear gang-related symbols and hide weapons.

What the law says School dress codes are governed under principles established in Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District (1969), in which the U.S. Supreme Court upheld the rights of Iowa students to wear black armbands protesting the Vietnam War: First Amendment rights, applied in light of the special characteristics of the school environment, are available to teachers and students. It can hardly be argued that either students or teachers shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate. This has been the unmistakable holding of this Court for almost 50 years.

Because gangs can be highly creative in adopting signs and colors, some dress codes are minutely detailed, irritating some parents who have to pore over them to ensure their kids aren’t wearing a prohibited color or logo.

“I don’t get child support, and I already did my back-to-school shopping,” complained Debbie Pua, the single mother of a student at Salinas High School in Salinas, Calif., after officials added new restrictions late last month. The new dress code prohibits anything red or dark blue — including shoelaces — and anything bearing numbers, lettering or sports symbols.

The rules might appear arbitrary, but outsiders often don’t grasp what a seemingly innocuous item might mean, Principal Michael Romero said. Take a popular sports belt with a buckle in the shape of the number 14: Police said “14” stands for the 14th letter in the alphabet, “N,” signifying Norteños or Nuestra Familia, a gang that began in Folsom State Prison in 1968.

Like a lot of students, Grace Davis, a sophomore at Salinas, said the new rules only compounded the problem.

“It doesn’t fix the disease. It just covers the symptoms,” she said. “I think we’re still going to have the same gang problem. We’re just going to be angry at the administration, and I don’t think that’s the way to go.”

Battling the Three B’s
In recent years, a phenomenon known as sexually provocative displays has intruded into the debate over school dress codes.

“Sexualizing childhood is diverting students from the kind of learning we want them to do,” Diane E. Levin, a professor of education at Wheelock College in Boston, said in a report on “Lolita in the Classroom” in NEA Today, the journal of the National Education Association.

An msnbc.com-NBC News special report The following NBC affiliates contributed to this report: KPRC of Houston; KSBW of Salinas, Calif.; KSEE of Fresno, Calif.; KXAS of Dallas; WCAU of Philadelphia; WHDH of Boston; WKYC of Cleveland; WOAI of San Antonio, Texas; WOWT of Omaha, Neb.; WPTV of West Palm Beach, Fla.; WRCB of Chattanooga, Tenn.; WTHR of Indianapolis; and WTLV of Jacksonville, Fla.

In the San Diego area, the Sweetwater Union High School District has banned any clothing that reveals the so-called three B’s: breasts, bellies or bottoms.

“That’s how some of their role models — the singers and the actresses — tend to dress, and that’s why we have a bigger problem with the young ladies,” said Arturo Montano, the district’s supervisor of student welfare and attendance.

Brittany Meredith, 16, a student at Canyon Crest Academy in San Diego, said the dress code at her school, part of the San Dieguito Union School District, was a good idea. The district bans all head coverings, halter tops and bare midriffs.

Outside school, Brittany said, she often sees classmates in “really tiny shorts and stilettos.”

“I’m like, ‘O-kaaaay ...,’” she said, describing her reaction to the scanty outfits.

MORE FROM EDUCATION

Education Section Front

Newsweek: The fight over abstinence at Harvard Failure 101: A class students could use Are rankings unfair to U.S. higher ed? Obama uses money to urge school changes Ranks of millionaire college presidents up again Community college plan may not be enough Education Section Front   Add Education headlines to your news reader: