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Emma Stein was just a freshman when she was cited for a dress code violation at her school, suburban Chicago’s Evanston Township High School. A security guard said her dress was too short, so Stein had to pull a pair of sweatpants over her clothes. She was not punished for the infraction, but it was still a really upsetting experience.
“It added a level of insecurity to this already stressful time,” Stein recalled.
Stein wasn’t the only one troubled by the dress code at the 3,700-student school. In 2016, students staged a protest demanding a new policy that didn’t discriminate along gender or racial lines.
And the school’s administration listened.
“We needed to look at getting a new dress code, and we wanted to make sure it was body-positive and didn’t marginalize students,” the school’s principal, Marcus Campbell, said.
In 2017, Evanston Township High School debuted its new dress code, which permitted tank tops, leggings, hats, and other previously banned items. The policy also stated that students were not to be marginalized based on race, class, gender, sexual orientation, or other identity markers.
The story of Evanston Township High School’s dress code is an increasingly common one. As dress code controversies sweep the education system, parents and students are fighting back against policies that they see as sexist, racist, or both. And more and more schools are listening to these protests, adopting guidelines that reflect a new understanding of what constitutes “appropriate” student dress.
Oregon NOW’s model dress code has had an international impact
Adopting a new dress code isn’t easy when most existing policies are several years old and contain many of the biases schools are edging away from now. So, the Oregon chapter of the National Organization for Women devised a model policy for Portland Public Schools that took effect in 2016 and has since spread across the country.
School districts such as Evanston’s District 202 and California’s San Jose Unified have either borrowed heavily from the dress code policy or adopted it outright. Praised for being inclusive, progressive, and body-positive, the Oregon NOW model may be the foundation for the dress code policies of the future.
“Boys can dress like girls, and girls can dress like boys,” explained Oregon NOW president Lisa Frack about the code. “You can be trans. You can be cis. Part and parcel on our mind is whoever you are, you can wear whatever you want.”
Within reason, that is. Clothing featuring images of drugs, alcohol, or obscenities is out, as is gang attire. Still, the dress code affords students a great deal of freedom to present themselves how they see fit. The main dictate is: “You have to cover your parts,” Frack said. But how students do so is up to them. They can wear short clothing, leggings, and tank tops — all garments that have been the source of school dress code conflicts.
Oregon NOW turned its model into Portland Public Schools’ official policy by approaching the school board about it during a 2015 meeting where students raised complaints about the existing code, Frack said. The board quickly agreed to form a working group, a mixture of Oregon NOW members and educators, to develop new guidelines. A few months later, the board agreed to implement the model for the 2016–2017 school year. Frack calls the dress code “the fastest advocacy” she’s worked on to date.
The policy has sparked interest from school officials in both the US and Canada, Frack said. Administrators from Evanston’s District 202, which consists only of Evanston Township High School, reviewed the Oregon model after 300 students protested and asked for changes to be made to the previous policy.
The demonstration prompted Campbell, assistant superintendent as well as principal, to research alternatives online, leading him to the Oregon NOW dress code. He and four Evanston Township High School assistant principals looked over the dress code piece by piece to see if it aligned with the high school’s values. They agreed that it did, and so they presented it to the superintendent, who signed off on it. The new policy, along with an equity statement penned by District 202 administrators, took effect during the 2017–2018 school year.
“I remember last year, a Latinx-identifying kid wore a sombrero two days in a row,” Campbell said. “Seeing him signals that it’s a different kind of school where kids can be free to wear what they want to wear, to express themselves, as long as it doesn’t glorify hate speech or violence, those kinds of things.”
The Oregon model also allows students to wear their hair as they please, an ongoing issue for both African Americans and Native Americans in schools. As recently as August, two religious schools faced criticism for telling black children they couldn’t attend classes because of their hairstyles. At A Book’s Christian Academy in Florida, school officials turned away a 6-year-old black boy for wearing dreadlocks. His family ultimately withdrew him from the school. Later that month, an African-American girl at Christ the King Elementary School in Terrytown, Louisiana, was forced out of class for wearing her hair in braided extensions, a popular black hairstyle that school officials said they banned over the summer.
Hearing about these sorts of dress code scandals drove Oregon NOW to write its model policy. “There was no answer,” Frack said. “Everybody’s got the problem, but what’s the answer? We’re a super small organization, but we thought we could do something besides saying, ‘Doesn’t this stink?’ We could write a model code, and it could be progressive, feminist, and anti-racist.”
Historically, school dress codes in the US have been anything but. While many schools continue to impose dress codes shaped by outmoded race, class, and gender constructs, a growing number are addressing how their policies disproportionately affect certain groups of students more than others, and they are letting students dress mostly as they please.
Students are challenging schools to devise fair and equitable dress codes
Dane Caldwell-Holden, director of student services for the San Jose Unified School District, didn’t realize how dress codes targeted certain groups of students until his district came under fire for its policy. “I’ll be honest,” he said. “As a teacher and administrator, I never gave a thought about that.”
Then, in 2015, a female student was pulled out of class and told to change into a baggy pair of shorts because hers didn’t pass the “fingertip test.” (Many schools say that shorts, skirts, or dresses are too short if they don’t hang past a student’s fingertips.) Humiliated, the student decided to fight the dress code. She and her mother spoke to school officials about how the policy harmed girls, and the following year, her mother sent Caldwell-Holden a link to Oregon NOW’s model.
After he reviewed that policy, Caldwell-Holden consulted with SJUSD’s associate superintendent and rewrote the dress code guidelines in the district handbook based on the Oregon model. District officials and school principals reviewed and revised the policy over several months, and in early 2017, the superintendent presented it to the school board and community members. In June 2017, the board voted to approve the new dress code.
The new policy permits spaghetti straps, halter tops, and short shorts. The previous code in his district had been in use for about 15 years, Caldwell-Holden said, pointing out that’s the case for a number of California districts. Typically, the state develops some sample codes, and school districts adopt one.
“Board policies tend to be replicated,” Caldwell-Holden said. “When you look at dress codes, they all look remarkably similar.”
The old San Jose dress code was never meant to body-shame girls, he said, but to prevent youth from wearing truly disruptive apparel to school. He considers such clothing to be gang attire or T-shirts with violent or profane messages. Rather than direct their attention to these sorts of violations, faculty members unevenly applied the dress code, citing girls nearly all of the time.
“That was completely unfair,” Caldwell-Holden said.
Since about 2010, the disparate impact that school dress codes have on girls and young women has received more attention, according to Todd DeMitchell, a University of New Hampshire professor of education and justice studies. He’s authored two books about dress codes: The Challenges of Mandating School Uniforms in the Public Schools and Student Dress Codes and the First Amendment. DeMitchell can’t point to any one event in the past decade that led to more focus on the discriminatory aspects of dress codes.
“It’s probably the accumulation of a number of policy streams,” he said. “And stories of female students disproportionately being singled out over male students started to be put into more of the popular press. It’s no one single thing, but we do see the news reporting a number of shaming incidents based on student attire.”
He recalled that in 2014, an Orange Park, Florida, high school student was forced to wear a “shame suit” consisting of a shirt and pants printed with the words “dress code violation” because the school considered her clothing too short. The story became national news fodder, complete with photographs of the student in the humiliating outfit. Protests and photographic evidence of rigid policies have driven the school dress code debate this decade, but DeMitchell also points out that social media has contributed as well. The rise of social media and video-sharing websites like YouTube has allowed student dress code complaints to reach critical mass.
Whether student complaints about dress codes go viral or stay local, they have the power to effect change. Carrie Truitt, a member of the Marion County school board in Kentucky, became interested in adopting a new dress code after a 5-foot-10 high school student, who was wearing business attire for Dress for Success Day, was told her dress was too short. The student’s father complained, arguing that male students who wear shorts the same length as his daughter’s dress do not receive citations. Truitt thought the parent had a point and began researching dress codes, leading her to Oregon NOW’s model.
“We have a little bit of bias in enforcement,” Truitt admitted. “I don’t know if we can go as far as Oregon NOW in Kentucky; you have to take into account perceptions and beliefs.”
For example, the idea that a tube top is acceptable to wear to school might rub some community members the wrong way, she said. But Marion County is a fairly liberal community, and school leaders will likely take an interest in a progressive new dress code if they know girls typically get the most citations, Truitt explained.
Not every school or district is open to changing its dress code. In fact, some schools continue to spark controversy with policies that shame female students and police their bodies.
Dress codes have consistently policed gender
In April, Florida teen Lizzy Martinez didn’t want her sunburned skin to get any more irritated, so she showed up to Braden River High School with a long-sleeved shirt and no bra. When she was abruptly pulled out of class, she was confused as to why.
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Although the dress code at her school in Bradenton, Florida, did not specify that girls must wear bras, Martinez said that her teacher complained and had her removed from class for being a distraction.
“The dean asked me if I was wearing a bra,” she said. “They made me put a shirt on over my shirt, and band-aids over my nipples.”
But that’s not all. Martinez, 17, said that she was also asked to stand up, jump up and down, and move around, “so the dean could see the motion in my breasts.”
Mitchell Teitelbaum, general counsel for Manatee County School District, said that student privacy laws prevent him from getting into specifics about Martinez’s account of events.
“There is a dispute as to the underlying facts that transpired at the school that day,” he said. But Teitelbaum added that “this district was clear it could have been handled better.”
The ordeal resulted in Martinez missing two hours of class time that day, she said. Altogether, the teen estimates that she missed about a week and a half of school because of the stress of the situation. Teachers discussed what happened to her with students, and many misrepresented the facts, she said.
“I felt really, like, attacked, singled out,” Martinez said.
But she and her mother did not keep quiet about the incident, which became a national news story. Martinez took to Twitter to describe how she’d been treated, and she and her mother both spoke to the press. Her dress code infraction fueled more debate about how these policies sexualize young women.
I decided not to wear a bra today and got pulled out of class bc one of my teachers complained that it was a “distraction to boys in my class.” My school basically told me that boys’ education is far more important than mine and I should be ashamed of my body. @Manateeschools :)
— liz (@lizzymartineez) April 2, 2018
“It crossed a line,” said Emma Roth, a fellow for the American Civil Liberties Union’s Women’s Rights Project. “We have seen dress code enforcement problems pop up all across the country. School administrators disproportionately enforce dress codes against girls and subgroups of girls — girls of color, gender non-conforming girls, trans girls, girls with curvier body types.”
The ACLU has traded letters with Braden River High about Martinez’s treatment, but so far no resolution has been reached, Roth said.
“They claim they’ve taken some kind of corrective measures, but we don’t know what those corrective measures are,” she said. “We find their response completely unsatisfactory.”
The ACLU would like the school to train teachers to avoid such incidents from happening in the future. They also want the faculty to stop, as Roth put it, “harassing” students who violate the dress code. That means no requests for youth to make any physical movements because of dress code violations, Roth explained. The Oregon NOW model, for instance, prohibits staff enforcing these policies from ordering students to bend over, hold up their arms, or make other motions.
Teitelbaum disputes Roth’s characterization of the school district’s action. Since the controversy, he says Manatee County has provided staff trainings and clarified wording in the dress code about what constitutes distracting or disruptive attire.
Martinez wants schools to exercise more sensitivity when it comes to student dress. “Nowadays, there’s all these different genders or students who don’t conform to one gender,” she said. “It’s totally unfair to say to somebody, ‘Girls have to dress and act this way, and boys have to dress and act this way.’”
LGBTQ youth are vulnerable to school dress code policies
Schools nationally have tried to prevent LGBTQ youth from wearing their preferred attire to prom, homecoming, graduation, and other high-profile events. But choosing clothing for school can be a daily struggle for gender-nonconforming students because dress codes have historically served to make students heed traditional gender roles. And a scan of school dress codes from several decades ago make it clear how administrators viewed gender through a narrow lens. Policies dictated that girls wear skirts, dresses, or blouses.
But boys had to conform to strict gender roles, too. In the early 1960s, the dress code at Pius X High School in Downey, California, cautioned boys as follows:
“Two extremes are to be avoided: both a careless, untidy appearance, and a vain, effeminate use of extreme fashions. What the school seeks to promote in a student is a clean, neat, well-groomed, manly appearance.”
The expectation for a “manly appearance” is why boys, regardless of gender identity or sexual orientation, continue to face school earring bans. Plus, some schools, such as North Carolina’s public K–8 Charter Day School, require girls to wear skirts.
Increasingly, students are challenging gender-based dress codes, and GLSEN (formerly the Gay, Lesbian & Straight Education Network) is one of many organizations advocating for them. In 2015, it updated its model district policy for transgender and gender-nonconforming students. The policy includes guidance about student attire, stating that dress codes may not be based on gender and that students have the right to dress in accordance with their gender identity. Moreover, schools can’t use dress codes to target transgender and gender-nonconforming students.
Ikaika Regidor, GLSEN’s director of education and youth programs, said that he understands that schools have dress code policies to prepare students for adulthood and the workforce, but the enforcement of the policies is often problematic.
“We ended up getting into a place in which some groups of students end up getting hurt more than others,” he said. Students feel, “I’m coming to school. I’m being my authentic self,” only to be told they can’t, he continued.
Regidor said that schools need more training and need to streamline who enforces dress codes. Doing so ensures the staffers imposing these policies on students have the tools to do so fairly, properly, and sensitively to gender-nonconforming youth. GLSEN offers training to schools and educates students about their rights as well. The organization teamed up with the ACLU to give youth a wallet-sized card they can show to administrators who wrongfully cite them for dress code violations.
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To avoid litigation, more school districts have implemented gender-neutral dress codes. In 2015, Puerto Rico, where students wear uniforms, changed its policy to permit boys to wear skirts and girls to wear pants. It’s a move GLSEN urges more school systems to make. Regidor said some school officials are ignorant about best practices for dress codes and LGBTQ youth. But once they’re educated, they stop enforcing discriminatory policies. Sometimes, though, the discrimination is intended.
“We could try to train them,” he said. “We could try to change hearts and minds, but we also know there are some administrators who have biases. There’s still work to be done by schools, by states.”
Disciplined for wearing braids to school
Deanna and Mya Cook object to how dress codes have long regulated both gender and race. The twins attend a Boston-area charter school that dictates skirt length, shoe color, nail polish, and makeup. But the girls never thought they’d get in trouble for wearing braided extensions. Last year, that’s exactly what happened.
Adopted by white parents, the girls said they got braids for the first time to connect with their African-American heritage. When they showed up at Mystic Valley Regional Charter School with the hairstyles, however, the school disciplined both girls, now 17. Mystic Valley did not respond to Vox’s request for comment about its dress code.
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“When we came back to school, we were told braids were not allowed,” Mya said. “They were inappropriate, drastic, needed to be fixed. It really hurt me to my core. I didn’t know what to do because braids meant a lot to me, and they kept telling me to take them out.”
She thought she’d be expelled, and no one would be the wiser. But the school’s treatment of the Cook sisters garnered media attention, and the ACLU, the NAACP, and other groups advocated for the girls.
After a complaint was filed with the state accusing the school’s dress code of being discriminatory, Mystic Valley relented. The school now permits braids, but the twins say it has implemented new rules they believe are retaliatory. Black hair ties, the most common color available in stores, are forbidden; students must wear either navy blue or white hair ties to match the school uniform colors, they said. The girls are not allowed to accessorize their braids with clips, clasps, or beads either.
Similar incidents keep happening to black girls, who are disproportionately pushed out of school due to dress code violations, according to the National Women’s Law Center “Dress Coded” report. Their bodies, hair, and hair accessories such as head wraps are policed more, the study found.
“Many dress code policies include a lot of vague and subjective language that really rubs against our biases,” said Nia Evans, NWLC’s manager of campaign and digital strategies for education. “They include words like ‘appropriate,’ ‘not distracting.’ Because of racism and sexism, I think there are black girls who have kinky, natural hair and are not perceived as clean or appropriate.”
She said rigid dress codes signal to female students that their bodies are a problem. Black girls are uniquely vulnerable because they’re already more likely than other female students to be suspended from school. Evans argues that forcing them out of class for any reason increases their chances of quitting school and entering the prison system. Accordingly, missing class because of dress code citations may have serious consequences.
Concerns about liberal dress code policies
As schools implement new dress codes in an effort to make these policies more equitable for students, they still contend with some doubts and concerns from community members. When San Jose Unified updated its dress code, some school officials and parents feared that a more lax policy would result in girls showing up to school in attire more fit for the nightclub than for school. Caldwell-Holden says that hasn’t happened. Instead, he rarely hears about schools issuing dress code citations and no longer receives complaints from students about the policy.
So far, the district has received just one nasty comment about its new code, he said. Sent in August 2017, it said, “I am just writing to say how disgusted I was to read … that halter tops, spaghetti straps, and short shorts will be allowed in school now. Seems to be that you are following in the new California tradition: slut everything up and dumb everything down.”
But there was a twist. The writer ended the comment by remarking, “I’m sure glad I don’t have kids in school.”
Actual parents have been highly supportive of the change, according to Caldwell-Holden. A few have worried that it might be harder to get kids to follow the rules they set at home about appropriate dress, but that’s it, he said.
Before Portland Public Schools adopted Oregon NOW’s policy, some community members expressed fear that students would abuse the policy and that girls in particular “would show up in bikinis,” Frack recalled. Concerns about the hypersexualization of girls in society are valid, but body-shaming students won’t solve the problem, she said.
“They’re just dressing the way they’re told to dress,” Frack explained. The answer isn’t “we’re going to correct our hypersexualized culture by blaming you.”
While some community members worried that students would dress provocatively, others feared that a less formal code would fail to prepare students for professional life.
But, Frack pointed out, “We’re not raising all of our kids to work in a bank. Some are going to have jobs where they don’t have a collar.”
Good school dress codes show compassion for students and begin with an equity statement, according to the “Dress Coded” report. Evanston’s District 202 dress code states that it “does not reinforce stereotypes and that [it] does not reinforce or increase marginalization or oppression of any group based on race, sex, gender identity, gender expression, sexual orientation, ethnicity, religion, cultural observance, household income or body type/size.”
“Dress Coded” recommends that policies be culturally sensitive, gender-neutral, body-positive, and not shame students. The report also calls for all staff members who enforce them to receive training. Because most schools don’t collect data about dress code citations, the NWLC advises them to start doing so. A record of these citations gives the public an idea of which students are most often cited and why. Additionally, the organization urges schools to give students a say in dress code policies.
How District 202 changed after updating its dress code
Two years ago, Emma Stein protested outside the District 202 superintendent’s office in a bid to get Evanston Township High to change its dress code. An 11th-grader then, Stein remained at the high school after the Oregon NOW model went into effect her senior year. When the school transitioned to its new dress code, Stein realized that getting dressed in the morning was no longer stressful.
“The amount of anxiety I personally had about even wearing a skirt my grandmother bought me dropped,” she said.
Now in her first year at Northwestern University, Stein recalled how each morning at Evanston Township High, a security guard would scan the students entering campus for dress code violations. The day she received a citation, Stein had been excited to attend an assembly about racial equity. In the end, she found herself derailed by a dress code that framed her appearance unfit for school.
About five years have passed since then, but Stein said the day of her dress code citation is burned into her memory because it caused her such embarrassment. Still, she knew she wasn’t the only girl with the same experience. Stein said she routinely saw other girls pulled aside by female security guards and teachers because of their dress. The fact that so few boys ever received dress code citations made her question the fairness of the policy.
When the more liberal code took effect, “The attire of the students didn’t change very much,” Stein said. This was the outcome Marcus Campbell expected. He said he believed in his students enough to know they wouldn’t abuse the new policy.
“We’re happy people have found it affirming, so they can focus on learning,” he said.
Campbell and Stein described the first day of school under the new code similarly. Both remember the tension on campus dissipating.
“It felt so great,” Campbell recalled. “That feeling is still palpable. It’s so great to have the administration listen to some very reasonable guidelines.”
Now, it’s largely up to students and their parents to determine which attire works best for school, he said.
Stein said that when the current dress code rolled out, students appeared lighter, less burdened. “It was such a dramatic change,” she said. “The change was almost tangible. At least for me, when this policy was amended, there was this collective sigh of relief.”
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