New dress code policy is open-ended

POTTSTOWN » For more than a decade, the Pottstown School District dress code, or uniform policy, has been a point of contention in the community.

Polls and public meetings have consistently shown about half the people support the idea of uniforms, and the other half do not.

It has been cited as both cause and cure for bullying, a savings for families — and an extra expense for families.

Teachers have complained that they are becoming the uniform police and parents have complained about both too lax and too stringent an enforcement of a policy that was often hard to

pin down.

In 2015, while still a student at Pottstown High School, student board member Emanuel Wilkerson convinced the board in a 5-4 vote to suspend the policy at the high school as en experiment.

That experiment lasted until last month, when the suspension became permanent — along with a surprise vote to do away with the uniform/dress code policy for all schools.

This was followed by the tantalizing question: “What comes next?”

The answer, as it turns out, is very little.

Thursday night the school board quietly adopted a new policy crafted from discussions at a policy meeting the week before from which the media fled.

The new one-page threeparagraph policy leaves things very much wide open and much open to interpretation.

It says simply that “each building level (elementary/ middle/high) will maintain and enforce a standard of dress among students.”

The standards will be based on three seemingly simple questions:

• “is what the student is wearing disruptive?”

• “would this standard of dress be appropriate in most work environments?”

• “is the student reflecting a version of Pottstown School District that is positive to visitors and community members?”

Other than that, the policy says that specific standards will be included in the student handbook for each building and that the administrators will “assess the compliance rate each year” and make whatever changes they feel are necessary.

Those changes will be announced before the end of school in June.

So you’re on your own folks.