SFPS relaxes dress code
Changes response to complaints that rules unfairly targeted female apparel
In an extensive overhaul of its dress code, Santa Fe Public Schools has tossed out 20-year-old rules calling for uniform-like “standard dress” for students in grades K-8 and has pared down what had been a detailed list of do’s and don’ts for high-schoolers.
The changes, announced to parents this week in emails, robocalls and Facebook posts, were largely in response to complaints that the code unfairly targeted female apparel — essentially discriminating against girls by banning any garment considered “distracting” to boys — and led to body shaming, Superintendent Veronica García told school board members during a public meeting Tuesday.
Though the changes don’t require board approval, she gave a presentation on the new dress code, developed by a committee led by Sue O’Brien, the district’s director of student wellness, with input from principals and administrators.
It’s important to get the word out to stakeholders, García said, including local retailers that for two decades have been stocking standard-dress items for kids — generally, solid-color polo shirts and khaki pants or jeans.
García said the dress code reform effort, which will
take effect when students return in mid-August, also addressed concerns among low-income parents that the required clothing was costing them too much money, as well as frustrations among educators about the amount of class time they’ve wasted over the years enforcing the rules and the folly of sending students home, resulting in lost learning time, over code violations.
“Time is wasted measuring a couple of inches here and a couple of inches there,” García told the board, adding that the new code is meant to “focus on behavior rather than clothing.”
Santa Fe High salutatorian Ramona Park, a staff member for The New Mexican’s Generation Next teen page, addressed the dress code issue in a My View published in August. Reflecting on a reprimand she had faced at school, Park wrote, “Dress codes tell us that our outfits and parts of our bodies, like shoulders, thighs and midriffs, should be sexualized. Dress codes tell us that a young man’s education is more important than ours. After all, the way we as young women dress might distract them from getting an education.”
Park noted that eight clothing bans in the code referred to women’s wear, such as spaghetti straps and crop tops, while only two were directed at male students: baggy pants and muscle shirts.
During the May 24 commencement ceremony for the Santa Fe High Class of 2018, Park, who is headed to Harvard University in the fall on a full-ride scholarship, revisited the issue in a speech that school board President Steven Carrillo, at Tuesday’s board meeting, called the best salutatorian speech he’s ever heard.
“Let’s just sidestep the fact that we are now assuming every boy is a sexual predator — for the record, they aren’t — but even if they were, why is it a girl’s job to cover up and not a guy’s job to keep it in his pants?” Park asked the crowd at Ivan Head Stadium.
“In addition,” she said, “when you take a girl out of class for wearing shorts or send her to student services, you’re taking time out of her learning and her education to body shame her, instead of reprimanding anyone who is, again, ‘distracted.’ ”
Park was not at Tuesday’s meeting. But her thoughts on the issue were cited several times.
Santa Fe High Principal Carl Marano, like Carrillo, noted the comments in her graduation speech and said that dealing with the vagaries of teen dress was “a struggle every day.”
The new code “gives us a lot more consistency,” Marano said. “We want to concentrate on learning.”
His school is planning thorough staff training on equitable enforcement of the new policy, he said.
For high-schoolers, the new code eliminates references to gang-related dress — including mentions of specific garments that many kids likely wouldn’t associate with gangs, such as bandanas, Dickies pants, Converse Chuck Taylor shoes, plaid and striped polo shirts, and certain color combinations: “for example wearing of the same color, such as black on black or blue on blue.”
Color coordination is now allowed on campus.
Students are no longer banned from wearing clothing representing the Insane Clown Posse — a reference known to draw blank stares from many local high-schoolers and parents until the hard-core hip-hop band and its fans, known as juggalos, staged rallies last year against President Donald Trump, racism and other forms of discrimination.
In the 2018-19 school year, the policy says, students will be allowed to wear hats and hoods on campus — but not necessarily in classrooms if teachers oppose the practice.
“Certain body parts must be covered for all students at all times,” the policy says. It names “genitals, buttocks, breasts and navel” — but not shoulders. Clothing must not reveal undergarments. Shoes must be worn at all times.
Leggings, once the center of controversy on high school campuses, are acceptable alternatives to pants and skirts.
“Offensive images or language,” such as profanity and hate speech, are off limits, along with references to drugs and alcohol.
Students might be asked to put on alternative clothing provided by a school if a student is in violation of the dress code, the policy says, but no one will be sent home.
Coaches and sponsors of other extracurricular activities are permitted to establish more stringent rules for their participants.
The policy emphasizes that school staff will enforce the rules “respectfully and consistently,” and “in a manner that does not reinforce or increase marginalization or oppression of any group” based on race, ethnicity, religion, body size or type, family income level, gender, gender identity or sexual orientation.
The biggest change in the dress code is the elimination of standard dress for K-8 students, a policy piloted in 1998 in a handful of elementary schools and later instituted districtwide in elementary and middle schools. (An effort to institute it in high schools failed.)
The standard dress policy had “eroded,” García said in an interview, because so many schools had begun to allow a range of exceptions.
The policy initially limited K-8 students to black, navy blue or khaki slacks, shorts, skirts, skorts or jumpers, and solid-color, logo-free shirts and blouses with collars, turtlenecks, sweaters and sweatshirts.
Eventually, the standard dress policy allowed jeans.
When it began, the policy was in reaction to “a lot of gang issues,” García said. But schools are no longer seeing much gang activity. It also was intended to cut down on clothing costs for families in an era when school-age kids experienced a high level of pressure to don brandname clothing.
But, García said, parents now say they would rather purchase more affordable clothing at thrift stores than budget for the uniform-style wear.
The mother of a student at Atalaya Elementary School, who asked that her name not be published, called the new dress code “great, very inclusive, very open” and said “it will save parents a lot of money.”
Her son’s school clothes often got dirty or torn, she told The New Mexican, and replacing them cost “a couple of hundred dollars a year.”
The dress code will get a review at the end of the first quarter of 2018-19, García told the board, and will be evaluated in a year, as it is every year. If educators and administrators find that the changes have led to unforeseen headaches, she said, the new rules won’t stay.
Input from principals will be vital, García said, because they are the ones in the trenches.