What does the school district’s dress code really tell my 5-year-old daughter?
During her third week in the Clark County School District, my 5-year-old daughter was marched out of her kindergarten class at Lummis Elementary and into the principal’s office. The reason? Wearing spaghetti straps to school. It was explained to me, after I was summoned to bring her an “appropriate” replacement top, that all straps must be “three fingers thick.”
Wasn’t I aware of the dress code? No. I mean, I know now that it was in that mortgage application-thick pile of papers handed to us at orientation. But it’s my wife who signed them, and who dresses Skylar every morning. I have no part in the ceremonial choosing of the school clothes. So, when my wife was out of town on business, my daughter chose her own.
I’m not using ignorance of a rule to excuse disobeying it. But I am glad it happened. Otherwise, I probably would have adhered to the letter of this law without questioning its logic, sanity or potential for psychological damage.
According to the CCSD website, its Dress and Appearance code (R-5131) serves to uphold “generally accepted community standards.” In addition, it ensures that kids do not “disrupt or detract from the educational environment of the school.”
I didn’t ask or really notice, so when my daughter chose that pink tank top, I’m pretty sure she was thinking, “It’s hot outside,” and “This pink shirt is pretty.” Not, “I’m going to turn my male kindergarten classmates on so much they won’t be able to learn.”
Right now you’re probably thinking how messed up it is for me to take an innocent action by a 5-year-old and inappropriately sexualize it.
Except this is exactly what the CCSD’s dress code does.
It teaches boys and girls that they are different because there are parts of girls’ bodies they should be more ashamed of than boys. It teaches girls that keeping these parts hidden from boys is their personal responsibility, because there are limits to male self-control. And it teaches girls that if something horrible happens to them at the hands of a male child or (God forbid) adult, then they are partially guilty because of the thoughts their clothing choices placed in the mind of their attacker.
I don’t even want my daughter learning these lessons at age 12. But for her to learn them at age 5 is unconscionable.
Even more subtly, it teaches kids who wields the power at school (and in life afterward). Because it’s the male whose focus on education must be protected. It doesn’t matter if the female is perp-walked out of class to meet a parent in the principal’s office, then forced to change before being readmitted into class. That can be considered less disruptive than a male having to look at a female’s bare shoulder, because his education matters more.
CCSD’s dress code should apply to, and be enforced upon, the sexes equally. Its words do possess a gender-neutral attempt at tone but, in practice, they apply almost exclusively to females.
“Ninety-nine percent of the time I see someone written up for a dress code violation, it’s a female,” said a CCSD schoolteacher who would only speak anonymously, for fear of reprisal by administrators.
“If a guy and a girl are both wearing ripped jeans and walking together, it’s only the girl who gets in trouble. The girl will ask, ‘What about him?’ and the administrator won’t acknowledge the comment. She will just be told to put leggings on or get written up.”
According to the teacher, boys regularly wear tank tops in the hallways, and even go bare-chested, with impunity.
“And during football season, they’ll wear short jerseys in class, showing their midriff, which would be against dress policy if it were not just female-directed.”
Yet only once in several years has the teacher ever seen a male get reprimanded for violating the dress code. He wore a shirt with a nude body part logo, and was asked to turn it inside out.
“That’s it,” the teacher said. “No write-up or anything.”
It’s not just happening in Las Vegas. More than half of all U.S. public schools maintain a dress code, many of which include gender-specific clauses and most of which are enforced unequally. As The Atlantic reported last year, these are inciting hundreds of online petitions and school walkouts. A number of seventh-graders in Portland, Oregon, won their protest, getting de facto feminine terms such as “bare midriffs,” “plunging necklines” and “sexually suggestive” removed from their dress code and leaving only the gender-neutral requirement of tops and bottoms (or a dress), and the banning of profanity and drug references.
But Portland is a progressive place. Las Vegas, despite its hedonistic national image, is still politically dominated by the conservative religion held by both of Nevada’s U.S. senators, the mayors of North Las Vegas and Henderson, and nearly half the seat-holders on the Clark County Commission.
My daughter’s teacher, and all the aides in the principal’s office, were pleasant enough about her spaghetti-strap felony. And my daughter seems okay. She saw my face in the office and was relieved to realize she was in no trouble with me. Two days later, the incident seemed forgotten.
But the fact that my kid seems okay does not excuse what this incident has already probably taught her at 5 years old.
There are some valid reasons I can think of for a dress code. I’m down with children of nudists not coming to school their favorite way (although I’d be totally cool if our puritanical society embraced our more natural state). It’s also okay with me if children of racists leave their favorite T-shirts at home. And gang members probably shouldn’t come dressed in their battle colors. These clothing choices threaten to incite severe disturbances, to say the least.
I even get what the CCSD is trying to do. It’s setting policy across the board — instead of picking 12 or some other arbitrary age of enforcement — to avoid making judgments about how sexually developed individual children are. That has to be a very tricky line to draw. I empathize.
But they’re trading one fail for a bigger, though more subtle, one:
I did not send my kid to kindergarten to receive sex education. Especially not the irresponsible, sexist variety that teaches her to be ashamed of her body because what boys think about it is more important than what she does.