Jun 30 2008
Beaufort Schools May Go to Uniforms
The uniform policy requires all elementary and middle school students to wear uniforms by the 2009-10 school year. High school students would follow a similar dress code the following year. Elementary and middle schools would need to have uniform policies settled by individual, school-based committees, and the county’s four high schools would adopt the uniform policy during the 2010-11 school year.
Board members and school officials have expressed a myriad reasons why they favor uniforms. Some say they decrease violence and conflict among students over designer or expensive clothing. Others say it prevents gang members from wearing gang colors to schools. Others say its purely academic — uniforms instill students with a sense of discipline and help them concentrate on school work.
This is becoming a popular conversation across the country and I am curious as to everyone’s opinion. The wheat side of me says yes, go to uniforms. Kids obsess too much over keeping up with the Jones’s when it comes to clothing and appearance. Kids from poorer families can’t afford the Diesel jeans and the $150 sneakers. I agree that dressing better subconsciously implements a sense of discipline and kids need that. I mean, I am a mature adult (well, an adult anyway) and I have to wear certain clothes to work. I can’t show up to the office in jeans and a ratty t-shirt.
But, the kid in me loves the frosted side and I say you’re only a kid once and shouldn’t a child’s appearance really be up to their parents? If some girls are going to school looking like teenaged whores isn’t that their parents’ responsibility for letting them out of the house dressed that way to begin with?
Hey! I like frosted Mini Wheats TOO!!!
Depends on which “poor” kids you’re talking about. The welfare kids I grew up with wore Air Jordans and Karl Kani jeans while I wore “Bo-Bo sneakers and wranglers from Walmart.”
I’d support uniforms in schools for the same reasons you would. I’d also hang my head in shame for living in a world where my daughter can’t wear her Hannah Montana T-Shirt to her first grade classroom because this is the best excuse left for the local education bureaucrats to use for why they suck so bad…