Changing the Dress Code

STUDENTS if you have been dress coded please feel free to include your own personal experience or just leave a comment saying why you signed this petition to help further push this change. Thank you.

The first school dress code law was established in 1969. Many decades have passed, and it is evident that it is now 2020. We are aware that the dress code is put in to “remove distractions”, however the years have progressed. On the other hand, this dress code has not progressed with the years and changing times. 

We believe in changing the dress code because it’s more focused on restricting the young women in our school. Restricting young women in our school will only make them feel that they are not able to freely express themselves through the clothing they wear. For many decades, clothing has been a form of self-expression, restricting such a form of self-expression can make one feel suffocated and not like themselves. 

In our school handbook, there is only one dress code rule that is directed towards males; that rule states “Male students should not wear cut out tops or sleeveless shirts (Rule 3).” However, for the females, it states “Tops should not expose any portion of the waist, hips, or midriff, and should not be open in the back. All tops should be worn so that the tops of the shoulders are covered (Rule 3)” and “Pants/shorts/skirts etc. must be worn at normal waist level. Skirts/shorts must be modest as to not cause a distraction or disruption to the school environment (Rule 5).” It's evident that the young women in our school have more restrictions than the young men in our school. These rules are also stating that the choices of these young women's clothing are a distraction if it is not modest enough for the males to not be distracted. On account of this, We would like to bring to your attention that social media is accessible to mostly everyone, and on those platforms, you can easily find all of those dress codes broken with a few taps of your finger. In this day and age boys have become desensitized to a shoulder or a midriff. However, if a problem were to arise if we were to rid these dress codes then the solution should not be to go back to the dress code we had before. It should be to educate the boys to be more respectful. The problem was never the girls dressing up, the problem was the boy starring and acting like hounds and the school itself over sexualizing normal body parts. In the real world, people see girls (and sometimes boys) wearing crop tops and such out and about all the time; the reality is this is nothing new. 

A few of our friends have had experiences where they felt confident in what they had on that day, but then a teacher came along and dress coded them which made them feel bad/worse about themselves throughout the day. That feeling stayed with them throughout the day and most likely distracted their performance in school. There have also been instances where teachers pick one student to dress code, however, another student wearing something similar to the previous student that was dress coded does not get dress coded like the first student. This shows us that the dress code is not even properly enforced. This also makes the student that was previously dress coded feel bothered and upset because they can't help but wonder why they were dress coded but someone else was not. Removing the dress code would change this for those students. 

We understand that wearing a bikini to school is not acceptable, but we believe that the other students know that as well. We believe that students already know what is acceptable and what is not, so they would not push it to the extreme.

Many women's earliest memories of feeling sexualized came from the adults who were enforcing their school’s dress code, so changing the dress code would change the narrative students receive which is the message that body parts (such as the midriff or shoulder) are bad, should be hidden, or are important to others. 

-Students of Habersham