It’s open season across America and our students are in the cross hairs. No, I promise you this article will not be speaking of the increase of school shootings or threats, even though that is a major epidemic facing the education system. Instead, I’m talking about the one issue that crops up year after year without fail at this time, but still never garners so much as an eye roll from many people as they don’t remember what it was like living under such rules that dictated how we could look each day. I am, of course, speaking of school dress codes. Most the time they are constricting and unfairly target girls, painting their bare shoulders and exposed knees as temptresses, ready to distract any acne riddled boy who lays their eyes upon them. However my school has recently changed its dress code to be fairer to girls, and I actually find it fairly reasonable to follow the rules consisting of nothing with derogatory messages or shorter than the mid-thigh. But I still have one major problem with my dress code. It isn’t fairly enforced.
It’s no secret that at my school there are selective punishments for different rule breakers. As a general unspoken rule in my school if you’re on honor society, look pretty, or are related to a staff member you can basically get away murder. On the other end of the spectrum, however, if you don’t try that hard in your classes, caused the school some trouble before, or are going against someone in the upper three categories, you’ll get the book thrown at you.
So, I decided to try a little experiment last week, and I intentionally wore a dress that broke the most infamous rule to see what would happen to me, someone who has been pegged as both a teacher’s pet and a troublemaker. (The latter I can not explain until after I graduate as I am currently under a gag order by my principal in regards to the circumstances behind it.) This rule I am speaking about is the “three fingers” rule or all shoulder sleeves must be a minimum of three fingers wide, more than enough to cover a girl’s bra strap. Out of the seven rules in my school’s handbook, this is the only one I have seen my school enforcing upon occasion and has actually sent people home over. This was also the easiest rule for me to break as I have a summer dress that has sleeves that are only about two fingers wide for most adults while it just doesn’t quite fit three for me. I wanted to see if any of the staff members would pick up on this minute break in the rule and what they would do.
However, I wanted to make sure that if I did get dress coded, that it was only for my sleeves and not for anything else with my outfit so I devised a control experiment as well. I paired a long sweater with sleeves that go to my wrist with the dress just for the morning to ensure that anything that was said by the staff had nothing to do with the thinner ones concealed beneath. Later in the afternoon, I would take the sweater off and try to see the same people who had said something in the morning to see if anyone would change their opinions on how appropriate my attire was.
During the ten minutes that my friends and I spent the morning walking the halls before classes began, I came across a variety of staff members who all either said nothing or complimented me on my outfit. These people included teachers, the ladies who work in the office, the principal intern, and my principal herself who had even said I looked nice in this rule breaking outfit. No one said anything about the fact that the dress was sheer and the black slip beneath wasn’t exactly long enough to reach the end of my middle finger when my arms were at my side, another rule I was breaking with the dress, or of course the two-finger-wide sleeves. I recorded seven staff members making some sort of note about what I was wearing, but nobody seemed to have a problem with my outfit when I was wearing the sweater.
Then when the afternoon came and the sweater was discarded, the principal did dress code someone, but it wasn’t me.
As I was walking to one of my afternoon classes, I was behind a girl who is notorious for breaking the dress code on a regular basis, but I had never heard of her being called out on it before. On this day, she had decided that it was the perfect weather for a spaghetti-strap shirt, something that is explicitly banned in the handbook. It was also just a pure coincidence that our principal was also walking the same way as we were, and just as she passed us, she turned around to say to the other girl in a friendly and casual way that it would be best if she put a jacket on over top of the shirt. She completely ignored how my dress broke the rules as well.
That was it. The principal then walked away, not checking to see that when the other girl went to her locker if she grabbed something to wear overtop of it, which she didn’t by the way, and there was no “formal” request to change out of the shirt like the handbook outlines and of course she wasn’t sent home. At that point, I gave up on my experiment because I knew that if my principal wasn’t going to call me out then nobody was. Plus it didn’t hurt that it was kind of chilly that day in the classrooms.
However, this wasn’t a total failure as it seems to be, as it proved the point I was trying to make with this experiment. My school picks and chooses how it enforces the dress code, which leaves those who are subjected to the punishment of either in-school suspension or going home feeling more demoralized than they should be as other people can clearly get away with it without so much as a stern warning from the person who is supposed to be the chief enforcer of these policies. This is why many people at my school have a problem with the dress code, (not that it’s unreasonable, which I don’t believe it is) but instead the school is so selective in enforcing it that why should we even bother having one at all?
