Dress code is one of the biggest struggles high schoolers have to face to express ourselves. The dress code now-a-days has slowly focused towards women, making the dress code more and more sexist.
In the student handbook it says that, “Clothing should cover the body from shoulder to mid-thigh.”
“I think shoulders are not distracting to our learning at all,” said Dr. Sprague.
That says a lot if our own principal said shoulders are not distracting.
Another reason we have a dress code is because it may be distracting to teachers.
Mr. Loewen, a teacher at Grandview, previously a private school teacher said, “It’s refreshing to see kids wear normal clothes, but of course I wouldn’t want to see shirts with marijuana and alcohol advertising on it.”
It’s more distracting seeing all of the bad stuff being advertised because you can’t stop thinking about why they would wear it.
“I like the fact that students have some freedom to express themselves in the way they dress,” Loewen said.
Mr. Loewen said,”It’s more distracting when kids wear their hoods on their heads during class than breaking the dress code.”
Meaning students in class are more and likely sleeping in the back of the class instead of learning.
Grandview is one of the few schools in the district that allows us to wear hats in school. We don’t find it distracting or disrespectful. Teachers don’t enforce students to take their hats off during the pledge of allegiance, yet girls get enforced to cover up shoulders, which is not disrespectful or distracting.
It’s been said that students are now getting dress coded for long socks and leggings.
“It’s hard to express myself at school with all the security guards influencing the dress code,” said by freshman, Valeska Nalley.
The supervisor of Security, Mr. Chavez, said, “I have never heard of people getting dress coded for socks, only if it was sponsoring drugs.” He has also never heard of people getting dress coded for leggings.
In high school, it’s all about finding out who you are and who you want to become. That’s hard to do when we have so many conflicts with the dress code.
I like the fact that students have some freedom to express themselves in the way they dress.
“The dress code is unfair for women,” said by junior Dashawn Evans at Grandview.
“The dress code isn’t a bad thing because school is suppose to be a professional workplace,” said by Julia Cacciavillani, a freshman at Grandview.
Cacciavillani also states that the dress code will prepare us for the real world.
“There needs to be guide lines for a working environment and if there isn’t guidelines, it won’t prepare you for the real world.”
In the real world there aren’t specific rules on what we can and can’t wear, but there are standards and expectations. For example, most people would wear a nice pair of clothes to a job interview, or wear a dirty outfit to paint a house. However, this isn’t going to prepare us for the real world, if we already know the expectations, meaning we know what’s appropriate and not.
When asked, most people said that the dress code should apply more to men and not all towards women.
“I feel like guys expose more of their body than girls do,” Evans said. “The dress code needs to be more equal to everyone in the school and not just towards women.”
Yes, the intentions of the dress code may be for the sake of a distraction free learning environment, but when females are constantly worrying about their shoulders showing, are they really able to focus?
Imagine buying a new shirt that you love, but you aren’t allowed to wear it to school because it shows your shoulders. Guys can buy and wear whatever they please, but girls have all different types of styles, that are not allowed to be expressed at school.
For me personally, whenever my mom and I shop, she will always ask if I can wear a cute top I picked out to school. My mom doesn’t expect me to follow the school’s dress code outside of school, but she does want to make sure the clothes that I buy, I can still wear them on a daily occasion. This stops me a lot whenever I go to get new clothes and it’s frustrating. If we didn’t have an organized dress code, I, along with many other girls, would not have to worry about this at all.
The district is working on changing the dress code, but it takes a lot of thought and they have to be very careful about it. Until then, the girls at Grandview will have to stress about a dress code that is unfair and sexist.
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Lain Iwakura • Mar 11, 2018 at 1:36 am
The issue here is a disagreement in the type of environment that school should be, and that the school tries to strike a non-existent middle ground and ends up with a policy that nobody likes as a result. If we actually wanted school to be an outright professional environment, then we would enforce a uniform and say that self-expression via clothing would distract from the information being taught. If we wanted the school to be a place where kids could express themselves however they wanted in the name of improving overall happiness, we would literally just not have a dress code. Though students wouldn’t like the idea of having uniforms at all, not having them kind of goes against the entire idea of mandatory school in the first place: Happiness isn’t important, getting ready to become a gear in the machine that is the economy is. School tries to find a balance between the two extremes in everything it does, from having tons of clubs that aren’t strictly academic to running social media accounts while at the same time having strict rules about what classes you have to take each year and professional-acting teachers in almost every class, but again, doing things to enjoy yourself goes against the concept of school in the first place. It’s kind of the same dilemma that the Jedi and Sith have in the Star Wars universe: As much as both extremes suck and lead to either anti-emotion teachings (pro-dress code) or an addiction to self-indulgence (anti-dress code), trying to find a space in the middle is even worse and just results in people becoming either apathetic to things that “matter” in the long term or falling to the dark side. (See: The Failure of the Grey Jedi). There is no good solution.
Scott Hunsaker • Dec 19, 2017 at 12:49 pm
I have the dress code open in another tab currently and nowhere does it say anything specifically regarding the appropriate dress for one gender or the other. In the article you state that you can’t reveal your shoulders and while that is true it applies to men as well. The reason you think the dress code is sexist isn’t because of the dress code itself but because the clothing marketed towards girls of a high school age are directly opposed to the dress code. If you can show me one example of how the dress code favors one gender over the other that doesn’t consist of a whiny excuse as “I can’t wear the revealing dress that I chose to buy over a tshirt” only then will I acknowledge the dress code as being sexist. You can respond to my claim at my personal email provided.
Lain Iwakura • May 1, 2018 at 9:44 pm
WARNING: IDIOT LIBERAL SJW PROPAGANDA INCOMING. READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.
You’re right about the dress code itself not favoring boys or girls, but I think you’re missing the point. One of the worst things about capitalism superimposed onto a culture that historically had good reason for genders to be somewhat segregated (in the hunter-gatherer age, it objectively made more sense for men to do hunting and women to stay at home) is that, even if those ideas aren’t actively perpetuated by those in power, that segregation takes time to be filtered out of society once it no longer serves a meaningful purpose. And in a capitalist society that actively encourages exploiting the general population as much as possible in the name of making money, a smart cooperation will continue to take as much advantage of preexisting inequalities as possible before that inequality is bread out of society, and perpetuate the subconscious social oppression that stems from that inequality in the process. This manifests itself pretty clearly in the women’s beauty industry, which initially took advantage of the cultural idea that women might as well try to be as beautiful as possible if they were going to have the free time that would inevitably come from raising kids at home, which allowed that industry to grow massively, thereby allowing them to advertise and continue the cycle until the cultural idea of women having to be beautiful (which, again, serves no functional purpose in a modern society where men and women have identical value as workers) has been so thoroughly embedded into the subconscious of the population that most women feel obligated to wear nice clothing and spend incredible amounts of time making sure they look pretty in general every single day.
Men, on the other hand, never had that insecurity bread into them by the ruling elite because it was never a cultural standard for most men to look pretty anyway, and as such, it is not reasonable to expect them to wear “revealing” clothing. Ergo, the dress code’s limitations, in spite of being “fair” in terms of what each gender is allowed to wear, are effectively only a concern for women, and as such, the concept of a dress code with any degree of freedom is inherently sexist.
There are two solutions here: #SmashThePatriarchy, and #InstateCommunism. In eliminating the idea that men should act differently from women (or, better yet, that gender is even a thing in the first place), we will eventually see both men and women dressing however they want, “revealing” clothing and all, and as such the limitations would apply equally. In ending the god-forsaken nightmare that is capitalism, we will eliminate the concept of advertising, and women will eventually stop feeling pressured to look pretty by seeing everyone else that way in the rest of society.