Committee will draft dress code for Dothan city teachers

This is not a First Amendment issue. This IS a moral issue. To have a better school, community, county, state, or nation, you must start fixing what has become broken. And yes, it may even start with little things like dress codes. If teachers would dress more appropiately, maybe the kids would take notice and dress more respectfully as well. A dress code issue would not be necessary if some of the parents AND teachers had a couple of ounces of dignity to them.

AND TO THE TEACHERS WHO DO DRESS MODERATELY, THANK YOU FOR NOT LOWERING YOUR STANDARDS.

BE ABOVE THE INFLUANCE!!

Can Dale County be next to adopt this for teachers and support personnel, PLEASE!!!!!!

—School Uniforms & Dress Codes—

“Congress shall make no law respecting the establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.“ [First Amendment, U.S. Constitution 1791] How rare is that?—to start an post on dress codes, and school uniforms, with a quote from the highest law in the land. The First Amendment doesn’t say, “These rules apply unless government wants to do something that would be hindered by them.“ The problem is that government-run schools are inconsistent with the First Amendment.

Who ever gave public schools the power to indirectly decide what should be in children’s wardrobes? More evidence of why government schools are inconsistent with the Constitution. How much protection can the First Amendment provide if all government needs to do is mandate the participation of the people in an activity and then claim that First Amendment protections must be curtailed so participation in the mandated activity can be more effective? Students who see that government has the right to require uniforms come to believe, as adults, that government has a right to similarly reduce freedoms in the future. They learn it’s futile to resist and sit passively by as freedom dies.

What’s happening in schools, and in America in general, is the writing of laws, rules and regulations to give government [and schools] the power to act in any situation. Every contingency is covered. But, such a world is intolerable and oppressive. So, government [and school administrators,] using a self-serving brand of common sense, ignore more rules violations than they enforce. In practice, this is no different than letting the ones in charge take any arbitrary action they’d like. Passing lots of laws and rules and enforcing them only when it’s convenient or suits the interests of the powerful is the same as having a nation governed by men, not laws. It’s the direction we’re heading.

Raise your hand if you think the first government school would have been built anywhere in this country if the citizens were told the government would then have a right to tell students what to wear, what they must eat, and what they can say both in and out of school. Since the amount of sleep students get affects learning, how long will it be before the government tells students when they must go to bed? Suppose a device is developed that can determine and monitor when a person is sleeping. Suppose a school board requires all students to wear the device. When inadequate sleep is detected, parents will be required to take corrective action subject to court intervention and removal of the child if they don’t.

It’s a reminder that the collective trumps individuality and that the collective doesn’t trust individuality. Clothes say nothing about learning. What’s the ethics of compelling minors to attend government programs and then telling them what to wear? If students’ dress doesn’t violate the law, why isn’t that good enough? If a student’s clothing is “decent” according to law, and the school demands something more, why isn’t that bullying? The greatest disadvantage of all—the threat to the essence of the Republic created by teaching students the government has the right to tell people what to do, right down to the clothes they wear and the speech they use.

How does compelling students to wear uniforms help them learn to make good choices? Isn’t a better way to let them wear what they want and suffer or enjoy the consequences of their choices? When clothing is more important than the job—be it learning biology and learning math or repairing a car and taking care of patients—we diminish the importance of the real job at hand: learning as a student or doing our job well. Shall food be banned in schools because some students engage in food fights? How about pens and pencils because some students use them to jab at other students? And what about computers? Some teachers use them to access pornography. Shall we toss out the computers?

One way school officials get to suspend students for misconduct is to question them about things that aren’t misconduct. This frequently creates indignation in the student, which is often expressed with punishable behavior or language. Any administrator who wants to can manipulate a student into misconduct. It’s a form of bullying, as recently redefined. And the lesson is those without power obey or suffer. What’s new? Educators routinely say better discipline and better attendance are key to improving academic outcomes. Sounds right. Why doesn’t it work? Because the system produces precisely the results it’s designed to produce and no amount of tinkering is going to dramatically improve academic outcomes.

When public schools first started, students generally were required only to show up as who they were with the clothing they owned to learn how to read, write and cypher. Increasingly, public schools are imposing more and more requirements on students and families as a condition of receiving a publicly mandated education. There is no end to what government can require—no end to system needs trumping student and family needs—unless the people say, “That’s enough. My child is here to learn. Do your jobs the best you can under the circumstances and stop interfering with private choices.“

I acknowledge that many parents are willing to legitimately cede to the schools the right to require uniforms. I personally disagree and believe it is a bad choice because it promotes laziness in parenting, reduces opportunities for learning how to exercise liberty responsibly, enables government to impose even more restrictions on students and families and undermines families as a core social institution. The cost is greater than any alleged benefits, which have yet to be validated by research. The less public schools accept and promote individual liberty, the less individual liberty society will enjoy in the future as the students socialized today will learn to accept and even desire more government control over personal lawful choices in the future.

Liberty has a price—not just on the battlefields but in how we choose to live our lives every day. Its diminution over time can be as imperceptible as the erosion of great mountains, though much faster and with no salient cause attributable to its loss. The less willing we are to pay the price of liberty, the less liberty we will have. Consequently, the conservative response to tasteless student dress is decidedly not government mandated uniforms.

The solution that is most consistent with liberty is to educate the parents, not to encourage public schools to expand the scope of their authority, particularly when the expansion has little if any impact on academic outcomes. As the nose of the camel protrudes ever further into the tent, people will find it impossible to move the camel out.

* * * *

-Cicero

Yeah, Cicero, you’re right. Youth violence in Britain is truly horrifying. A Clockwork Orange has come true. But they all wear school uniforms. How can this be? /sarcasm off

The School Uniform Movement and What It Tells Us about American Education

“Despite the media coverage,” Brunsma writes in The School Uniform Movement and What It Tells Us About American Education, “despite the anecdotal meanderings of politicians, community members, educators, board members, parents, and students, uniforms have not been effective at attacking the very outcomes and issues they were assumed to aid.”

Since states have classified parental rights as a fundamental right and since parents have the right to direct the religious and moral training of their children, then a school board cannot adopt a policy that limits parental rights unless that policy is the least restrictive means of furthering a compelling governmental interest.  What’s that mean in everyday terms?  A school board cannot adopt a standardized dress policy without an opt-out provision for parents who object, because it has a lesser restrictive means available to it, that being a regular dress code that can prohibit any attire that interferes with the educational process and to do so would limit fundamental parental rights.

* * * *

Uniform Effects?

—Northview students protest uniforms policy—

First the state compels children to attend school, then it tells them precisely what to wear without a compelling state interest achievable through less restrictive means. Why should schools have this kind of power? How have we, as a nation valuing individual rights and freedoms, evolved to the point where a committee of moral busy bodies would think it’s acceptable to compel all students to wear identical clothing? That’s more a principle of communism than of liberty. If a committee of moral busy bodies believes it’s appropriate to force students to wear school uniforms, then, in my opinion, this is more evidence of the failure of our system of education to teach the values of liberty, freedom and responsibility.

Student clothing choice is a freedom that implicates constitutional protections. Since the constitution does not empower government to mandate the wearing of uniforms in public schools, it is those who favor school uniforms prescribed by the government who need to find the majority needed to change the law, not those who oppose school uniforms.

Educators love the role of equalizer. I’ve never met a parent who wanted his/her child academically equalized. The preservation of liberty requires vigilance. What people give up, they may never get back—like with public sector union contracts. And once it’s gone, there’s less to bargain with in the next round of restrictions on liberty. Setting precedents of giving away liberty because the encroachment is small is a dangerous practice.

“Parents” are perfectly free to dress their children in uniform-like apparel if they’d like. They don’t need a state official telling them to do it. However, the idea that public school officials can take “issues” off the tables of students and parents without their consent is patently offensive. If school administrators want to take an issue off parents’ tables, I suggest they work on spending and taxes rather than on initiatives that diminish liberty.

As the nose of the camel protrudes ever further into the tent, people will find it impossible to move the camel out. All public schools—and government in general—need to encroach on liberty is a “rational basis.“ Public schools have a rational basis for regulating clothing. They also have a rational basis for ensuring students get enough sleep because adequate sleep is essential for efficient and effective learning.

The line between acceptable and unacceptable interventions is arbitrary. The more interventions allowed, generally the easier it becomes to add even more interventions. I prefer to draw one of the lines of unacceptable interventions at student dress. If the clothing is lawful, schools should restrict their approach to tasteless clothing to social, cultural and peer persuasion. They should make their case about appropriate dress to parents and students and leave the choices up to them.

If their case is compelling, most reasonable people will agree. If parents and students can’t be educated, or refuse to be educated, then I prefer the poor clothing choices of the uneducated to the mandated clothing choices of government schools. It’s more American. Those who don’t will have to be tolerated. Conditioning the right of public education on one’s personal appearance is inconsistent with American values, in my opinion.

When students get to go to school wearing the clothing that reflects their tastes and values, that’s when they feel better about themselves. In the short-run there may be a better feeling from uniforms. In the long-run, the feeling will likely be lower than the feeling they get from exercising individual choice, which is what public schools should be promoting.

Do all teachers wear identical outfits? Does everyone use the same bathroom? Does everyone ride a bus to school? Does every student get and Individualized Education Plan? There’s lots of non-uniformity in public schools. Authority prevails.

If schools must not discriminate against gays, they have no rational reason for discriminating against cross-dressers. What good is a law the prohibits discrimination based on sexual orientation but forces people to wear the clothing of a sexual orientation they don’t have? Discrimination remains if that’s the case. Imagine freeing the slaves but requiring them to wear the clothing of slaves.

* * * *

-Cicero

www.landsend.com Look under uniforms. Everything there comes in adult sizes as well. This is a no brainer. Make the dress code the same for the kids and the teachers. Done.