Uniforms

are they a good fit?

So, one day sixth-grader Tiffany gets sent to the principal’s office because her teacher thinks the girl is inappropriately dressed for class. Tiffany is wearing a micro-mini skirt that is rolled down to just above her belly button and a little halter top that exposes her midriff.

Principal Judy Montgomery, of Sacramento’s Bear Flag Elementary School, takes Tiffany home to change her clothes and to check in with her parents, thinking that perhaps they hadn’t seen their daughter leave for school that morning. But the reaction Montgomery receives isn’t what she expects.

“Her mother was really upset with me,” Montgomery says. “She said, ‘I think she looks cute!’ ”

In an era where some parents seem unwilling or unable to draw the “clothes” line with their children, where pop culture influences kids’ clothing choices as never before and school safety—including keeping children out of the crosshairs of gang violence—is at the top of everyone’s minds, school uniforms and dress codes (looser but still explicit standards for dress that can be tailored to exclude the sort of outfit Tiffany wore to school) can play a significant role. But what that role should be is open to interpretation and can be a source of frustration—and some skirmishes.

Dress codes and the Ed Code
California Education Code 35183 gives school districts the power to regulate student attire, declaring that “Schools need the authorization to implement uniform clothing requirements for our public schoolchildren.” On the other hand, the same law also states, “The governing board shall provide a method whereby parents may choose not to have their children comply with an adopted school uniform policy.”

This legislation—the only state guideline educators have to go by on the matter—can be exasperating for those who must wrestle with it day-to-day on campus. For the most part, districts allow schools to decide whether to impose dress codes or require students to wear uniforms. School officials interviewed for this story all sought their constituents’ buy-in, asking parents and students to vote on the issue and typically requiring about 75 percent approval to proceed. Of course, that leaves the 25 percent who don’t approve, and disapproving parents certainly influence their children’s attitudes on the subject, which adds to the difficulty in administering the rule. Then there are parents who—officially or unofficially—opt their children out of the provision.

“It’s a constant battle,” Montgomery says of policing appropriate apparel. At her school, only about 1 percent of parents officially opt their kids out, “But there is a huge problem with about another 30 percent who do not sign a waiver and do not abide by the policy. … There is not enough meat in the policy to actually require families to abide by the uniform, which makes it very hard to enforce.”

Teachers play a crucial role in enforcement, of course. Every day, in classrooms of up to 30 students, they must try to remember which students who are not in uniform have turned in waivers signed by their parents allowing them to opt out, or they must take up valuable class time by checking each child’s status against a list. The task can be complicated by students who show up out of uniform without a waiver and students in only partial compliance—wearing the proper pants with a nonstandard shirt, say, or, in a school that prohibits prints, wearing socks embossed with the image of Tigger, the Winnie-the-Pooh character. (Napa Valley Unified School District is appealing a trial court judge’s ruling that its restriction on prints violates students’ freedom of expression.)
At Barbara Comstock Morse Elementary School (like Bear Valley, in the Sacramento City Unified School District), Principal Mike Gulden uses a combination of logic and humor to deal with uniform-resistant students.

“Kids don’t want to do their homework, either,” Gulden says. “The reality is, there’s an instructional purpose [to requiring uniforms]. I tell them, ‘We wear uniforms because (1) that’s our policy and (2) you see me wearing it and (3) what if your parents came in to see me in the office, and I had my shirttails hanging out and three or four layers of clothes on? What would they think of me, do you suppose?’ That usually gets the giggles going.”
Gulden wears the school’s uniform colors in some combination every day, and he believes that staff needs to “walk the walk” as well.

“If we don’t appear to support the policy, why would the community support it?” he asks.
The vigor with which schools enforce apparel policies differs from school to school. Some will send children home for what may seem like a minor infraction. Others try to be accommodating, realizing that neither parents nor their children can always adhere to policy, for whatever reason.
“It comes up quite often from parents who are tired of trying to get the child to wear the uniform,” Gulden says. “I try to strike a happy medium and say, ‘Wear it only two or three days a week’ or ‘rearrange the styles a bit.’”
“What if the uniforms disappeared tomorrow?” Gulden asks. Differences between “our needy kids and fairly well-to-do kids might become magnified and polarize the campus some,” he fears, creating resentment and tension. “Life has enough hurdles for families and kids; I don’t think one of them should be here at school. There’s that stigma of ‘my socioeconomic status’ … Kids 5, 6, 7 years old shouldn’t have to deal with that.”

Leveling the playing field
Still, uniforms offer a variety of benefits, according to supporters such as Linda Rondeau. She’s the assistant superintendent of educational services at Pittsburg Unified School District in Contra Costa County, which recently adopted a mandatory K-8 uniforms policy districtwide.

“It became policy beginning in 2006-07,” Rondeau says. “The reason was to promote school safety and enhance the learning environment, and diminish the clothing competition.”

However, the transition didn’t occur without some snags.

“Elementary was really all right with it, [since] most of the students at our sites had been voluntarily wearing uniforms for a couple of years,” Rondeau says. “The junior high students were quite unhappy with it. Overall, parents were thrilled.

“Initially, it took more energy than not having the students in uniforms,” Rondeau adds. “Follow-through was vital. Now, no one is looking at shirts with graffiti or wondering if what [students] are wearing is affiliated with a gang or worrying about someone’s designer sweatshirt.”

Judy Hunt-Brown, principal at Maeola R. Beitzel Elementary School in Sacramento, says classmates who are dressed alike are far less distracted.

“With today’s fashions of minimal dress, there are fewer issues with clothes that are too revealing” when students wear uniforms, Hunt-Brown says. “Students spend less time talking about and analyzing everyone’s dress. There are also fewer issues with the kind of shoes students need to have to be able to participate in physical education.”
Hunt-Brown will become principal of a new school, Sunrise Elementary in nearby Elk Grove Unified School District, this fall. At press time, neighborhood parents were preparing to vote on uniforms for the school.

Empirical data and everyday experience
In his 1996 State of the Union Address, President Bill Clinton challenged schools “to teach character education, to teach good values and good citizenship. And if it means that teenagers will stop killing each other over designer jackets, then our public schools should be able to require their students to wear school uniforms.” This often-quoted remark is cited by advocates as a primary argument for uniforms in public schools. But whether—or how much—uniforms promote safety remains subject to debate.

“It is not true that there has been no empirical research conducted to assess the effectiveness of school uniforms on student behavior and educational outcomes, yet there is much to be done,” David L. Brunsma wrote in his 2004 book, “The School Uniform Movement and What It Tells Us About American Education.”

He went on, in part, to use two reports from the U.S Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics (the 1988 “National Educational Longitudinal Study” and the 1998 “Early Childhood Longitudinal Study”) to debunk the notion that there is a correlation between school safety and uniforms. Quoted in a July 2006 article on GreatSchools.net, Brunsma said critics “appear to want to continue relying on anecdotal aspects of the debate while simply disregarding rigorous, scientific study of the issue.”

It’s not known how much time the author, a sociology professor at the University of Missouri, has spent standing in a crowded hallway of public school students when classes let out. But elementary principals who do that regularly, and who were interviewed for this story, have a store of personal experience that contradicts Brunsma’s academic argument.

And, in any event, ridding their schools of gang colors is just one of the benefits those principals attribute to uniforms. There’s also the absence of elitist designer labels, the ease with which uniformed students can be identified on field trips—and, on campus, the ease with which intruders out of uniform can be detected.
Principal Hunt-Brown also embroiders a broader benefit onto the list: “Overall improved student behavior as a result of uniforms results in fewer behavior incidents on campus.”

Asked how she measures this claim, Hunt-Brown has a ready reply.

“From feedback teachers gave me and discipline coming into my office,” she says. “[Students’] conduct changed. Their conversations coming into school in the morning changed. Do I have empirical data? No. Just observational.”
John Ginn, principal at Sacramento City USD’s Bowling Green Charter School, adds another observational benefit to the mix.

“Wearing uniforms is promoting job skills at a young age,” Ginn says. “We learn to dress properly for work, church, play, et cetera. Whenever we are lucky enough to have a student wear his uniform with a sports coat or blazer, we tell him that he is looking like an adult going to work.”
Morse Elementary’s Gulden likens student uniforms to the standard attire of doctors, businesspeople and peace officers.

“These are folks who come together with a common purpose,” he says of those professionals. Wearing a uniform “prepares students for the world of work down the road.”

‘Deeds, not duds,’ the measure of a student
“I think [uniforms] are great,” affirms Montgomery, the principal with the scantily clad sixth-grader at the start of this story. “They level the playing field. They say, ‘This is our business; this is our job.’ They’re professional. They do serve a purpose to create an atmosphere, a school culture. [Kids] stand out as a representative of this school.”

To those who question whether uniforms smother students’ creative freedom of expression, Rondeau—of the now districtwide uniform-requiring Pittsburg USD—says no way.
“We hope to see students’ creativity [expressed] academically and artistically,” Rondeau says. “There was a great article written by Jeffrey Earl Warren regarding school uniforms; it appeared in the [San Francisco] Chronicle on April 2, 2007. His ending statement reads: ‘Uniforms allow children the right to distinguish themselves by the deeds they’ve done, not the duds they wear.’ Pittsburg USD agrees!”