<p>Coming from someone who graduated from a Catholic school with a uniform, I actually liked having one. I never had to worry about what to wear to school each day. While we had to buy uniforms at a specified store, the jumper and shirts I bought lasted me my entire HS career. And parent groups help with hand-me-down uniforms for other parents in need, and I also got a few of those from my sibling. I know my parents saved a lot of money because they did not have to buy me a new wardrobe each year. Around 80 to 100 dollars for 4 years of clothing is not bad at all. </p>
<p>I also know kids that on out of uniform days wore their uniform because it was a lot easier for them. It also prevents bullying people for what they wear. While teachers do have to check dress code it is easier to address when there is a simplified policy. </p>
<p>Though uniforms tend to change a little through the years, I knew girls who wore jumpers that had the logo from the 90’s and there was no problem. I know people think you cannot be an individual with an uniform but honestly you do not go to school to “express yourself” you go to school to learn. And you learn to accessorize your uniform anyway. A guy I knew wore suspenders the entire year, and most guys have novelty ties. Girls use purses, bracelets, earrings, shoes, and socks to show their individuality. It is okay to look a bit ridiculous when everyone else is too.</p>
<p>My school also had out of uniform days such as spirit days when we wore school colors for a pep rally, dress up days for the seniors during mock trial, out of uniform days for sports so they could wear team shirts or jerseys for a game or senior night, out of uniform days for drama for the days they had a show so they could wear the play t-shirts and advertise, and out of uniform days as a prize for food drives and other forms of school service. When you have an uniform you appreciate these sort of days and girls can get pretty excited about them. Everyone looks pretty stylish on out of uniform days. Clubs can make t-shirts and sell them to members to support the club and then get a out of uniform day to wear them for their activity. </p>
<p>While kids may grumble about their uniforms (me included) at the end of the day, it made my life a lot easier during the year. No one was distracted by clothing and it separated being in school and out of school. Everyone was on the same playing field, and while most jobs do not have an uniform, most have dress codes that employees must adhere to. My experience with uniforms has been beneficial.</p>
<p>My read of several posts is that a uniform requirement is a deprivation to those who want/need to use personal expression through their clothing at school to (girl group) bond. Other posts claim uniforms stiffle individuality.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>We probably agree although semantics make come into play. Ridiculous or practical without reference to “style”? At Hockady the uniform includes saddle shoes and socks. In the Winter, the sweat pants provide a pratical way to address the chill factor (the school has multiple buildings so there are times they will be outside between classes). </p>
<p>I do see girls in the Hockaday plaid skirt/sweats ensemble at the two shopping centers nearest to the campus after school. Perhaps “ridiculous” IS a fashion statement that “hey, its practical!”</p>
<p>Within compulsory education laws there is “choice”. In Texas you can “attend” online in many areas of the State. The existence of Charter and Magnets provide a possible option to “get away” from a general public with a uniform policy. As previously mentioned you can home school or attend parochial or private schools (with or without uniforms). Yes, each of these choices has attendant costs.</p>
<p>The choice issue seems to cut both ways. The issue seems to be one of the costs (financial and otherwise) of making a choice. I say that if the state and local elected school officials make a decision (uniform, strict dress code or neither of the above), then the cost of a choice that runs counter to that decision should fall on the person making that choice.</p>
<p>If the school officials’ decision “irks” a parent, work to vote them out.</p>
You keep saying your D couldn’t have gone there, but it’s a public school and she would have the right to attend. These people aren’t monsters and I’m 100% sure that some type of accommodation would have been made. (After all, they have to make accommodations for lots of other issues.) </p>
<p>No doubt it would have involved statements from doctors, and your doing the best you could to accommodate the spirit of the uniform with the appropriate colors and degree of modesty, etc. Presumably your kid wasn’t going to school nekked. If this is your main concern with the proposed change, why not call the school and find out what they would have done to accommodate your D?</p>
<p>*Quote:
Wearing a uniform signals to the kids from a young age that they are putting on their uniform to go to school like a job.</p>
<p>Funny. I’ve worked plenty of jobs. Not a single one ever required a uniform.*</p>
<p>My husband has never had to wear a uniform for work, either. But, in a sense, he has. When he first started working, every guy wore dress slacks, a long sleeve shirt, and a tie. Now every guy wears khaki pants and a polo. A uniform? Well, not exactly…but kinda.</p>
<p>Coming from someone who graduated from a Catholic school with a uniform, I actually liked having one. I never had to worry about what to wear to school each day. While we had to buy uniforms at a specified store, the jumper and shirts I bought lasted me my entire HS career</p>
<p>Agree. H and I went to Catholic schools. Our kids went to Catholic schools. Uniforms makes dressing for school sooooooo easy.</p>
<p>And again, whether uniforms make your life easy or not is an OPINION. It made my life much harder. If you want to CHOOSE to send your child to a school with uniforms then it should be just that- a choice. The default should be no uniforms as many families would choose not to use uniforms and if your public school has mandated uniforms then you have lost your ability to choose. Many districts don’t allow you to choose to go to a public school other than the one you’re assigned.</p>
<p>I don’t understand why people have an issue with uniforms, it make the school look more unified, it’s smarter and it is a lot less effort for the students. I particularly don’t understand why you would move schools because of it, it seems a pretty unimportant part of choosing a school.
Over here every school has a uniform, and they can often be quite specific, my school one can only be bought from one shop as it is a specific skirt, a blue and white striped blouse and a navy blazer withe the school’s badge on.</p>
<p>I wore a uniform from 1st through 12th grade, and it did equalize. It also made mornings incredibly easy, and saved my parents a lot of money on buying me clothes throughout the school year. When I have kids one day I hope their school requires uniforms.</p>
Why is this important? All the students are attending the same school in the same building. That’s not “unified” enough?
I have no idea what that means.
I don’t see picking out clothes in the morning to be any effort at all. We all do it every day, don’t we? And many kids actually enjoy the process of shopping for clothes and putting together outfits. In addition, the kids still need play clothes to put on when they get home, so there still need to be plenty of other items in the wardrobe. In our house, the school uniform (actually just a very restrictive dress code that required clothes our D wouldn’t be caught dead in anywhere else) meant we spent more money and had more laundry.</p>
<p>I believe when the government (which a public school is part of) gets involved in something as personal as the clothes on your back, it has to be for a good reason. Unless gang colors are an issue (hardly a common public school problem), I don’t see any good reason for a public school to require uniforms. If a school can’t maintain discipline and provide a decent education without requiring khaki pants, plaid skirts, polo shirts, blazers or whatever, something is seriously wrong that mere clothing rules won’t fix.</p>
None of the schools that I ever went to (public or private) allowed holes in jeans. And there’s a reason for it.</p>
<p>I went to a private school that had a strict dress code. We weren’t allowed to wear anything with screen-printed graphics (even school t-shirts were not allowed- if we wanted to wear them, we had to pay at least two dollars on special days). We weren’t allowed to wear flip-flops, but we could wear dressy sandals… which by the way, were the same thing except for one costs way more. Boys could only wear collared shirts.</p>
<p>Anyways, that dress code made my life a nightmare. Almost everything in my closet was a t-shirt. By senior year, I had accumulated over 30 t-shirts from my school alone and wasn’t allowed to wear a single one of them. Most of the girls at my school had a lot of money and time and they came to school dressed like it was a runway. Me, on the other hand, I was at school from 7 am until at least 6 o’clock at night and did NOT have time to get ready for school. I also didn’t have money to buy a lot of clothes… so the amount of clothing I owned that actually fit school dress code was really low.</p>
<p>My life would have been SO much better with a uniform. It would have made my mornings simpler. It would have made me feel more secure about my outfit. It would have also been cheap. Most schools require khaki pants/skirt and polo shirt. You can buy a few pairs of those for relatively cheap and you can even wear them on the weekends and look fine. On top of that, most public schools offer uniforms for students who can’t afford them. I’m totally pro uniform.</p>
<p>I like how mom2collegekids described the men’s form of dressing. I think women can do the same. My g/f, a physician, wears black pants and a sweater set daily. I think I know all her sets; cashmere, animal prints or something classic. </p>
<p>When the worm left the uniform elementary school for MS, he wore cackis shorts or pants daily. AUGirl, your school seems more restrictive, not allowing school shirts. Ours could wear logo shirts on Fridays. If you could only wear solids, why not just have 5 and mix/match with cacki shorts, skirt and pants?</p>
<p>AU it seems like your life would have been a lot easier with a less restrictive dress code, not more. That way you could wear all those free tees and not have to buy a uniform :).</p>
<p>Exactly! One great thing about my urban public magnet STEM-centered high school was that there was NO effective dress code in practice. Students wore everything from fancy corporate-type suits to punk rock/metal black leather jackets/riot-grrl outfits and no one paid much heed. We loved the freedom and felt uniform policies or restrictive dress codes were for narrow-minded shallow-minded admins and parents. </p>
<p>Never had issues with not taking learning seriously as shown through our Westinghouse/Intel/Siemens record, academic awards, average SAT scores, employer hiring preferences, elite college admissions, or school/alum unity. </p>
<p>A reason why current students and many alums are taking umbrage about the idiotic administration’s implementation of a more restrictive dress code and more importantly, the extreme inconsistency of enforcement as it is mostly done to young women using admonitions that are misogynistic (i.e. Something idiotic about accidentally getting pregnant and/or not being able to find good husbands). </p>
<p>To add to the insult, some of those very admins are hypocrites according to some older female HS classmates I know who were creepily encouraged to dress in short skirts for “extra credit” when those very admins were teachers.</p>
<p>I guess I didn’t make my point completely clearly. While a less restrictive dress code would have made my life easier, a more restrictive uniform would have made it even easier.</p>
<p>The less restrictive dress code would have allowed me to wear t-shirts, yes, but it also would have made me still stick out. I was at my school on a scholarship and couldn’t afford to buy lots of new, stylish clothes. Since a lot of the girls could, I definitely was under-dressed on a daily basis and it was uncomfortable. If there had been a uniform, everyone would have been the same and I wouldn’t have had to worry about it.</p>
<p>My sister goes to a school with uniforms and I think it’s great. It’s a public school. They still get some choices. They get to choose between brown, navy, kelly green, and light blue polos and they can choose between khaki or navy bottoms. Girls can wear shorts, skorts, pants, or jumpers and boys can wear shorts or pants. Everyone essentially wears the same thing, but it’s not exactly the same thing. Her school also takes donations of gently-used and new uniforms so that students who can’t afford uniforms can get them for free. Whenever there’s a sale at Old Navy for polos, my mom gets over there and stocks up on a bunch of shirts. It’s way more cost-effective and looks better than what most students would wear instead.</p>
<p>Personally, I’m just all for uniforms because I hated sticking out in school. I would rather go to school and concentrate on the classes rather than the clothing.</p>
<p>I completely emphathize with teachers who are made into the clothing police, I agree that in some areas, kids may wear totally inappropriate clothing in public.
That seems to be just one area where the school is meant to take the role of the parent.</p>
<p>It is fascinating the responses this thread had gotten, I started it impulsively, not because I cared that much about uniforms, but because I am weary of our district implementing programs without community input( although they did recieve input from a select group of parents on this issue), closing programs suddenly without input, and frankly doing whatever the hell they want without regard to how it affects the classroom environment.</p>
<p>A recent example would be, a meeting was held regarding this new elementary program last Wednesday with the district and parents.
On Thursday parents were notified that an alternative high school would be sharing the same site. Apparently the district didn’t want any discussion about it, so it wasn’t mentioned at the meeting the day before.
All too typical.</p>
<p>Interesting how different the dynamic is at different schools regarding social viewpoints on clothing choices. Such differences exist in college, in workplaces, and other social situations as well. The attitudes in a STEM-focused high school as described in #236 may be analogous to that of people working in non-customer-facing roles in a Silicon Valley computer company.</p>
<p>Then again, it does seem like the dress code described in #233/#237 accentuates socioeconomic class differences. Prohibiting inexpensive casual clothing like school T-shirts that many high school students would prefer to wear likely makes it more obvious who can afford nicer dressy clothes versus those who are budget limited.</p>