Tuesday, June 4, 2013

District Throws In Towel on School Uniforms, Largely Relaxing Policy For Simplicity’s Sake

The Flagler County School Board won’t say so explicitly, but it’s saying it by policy. The board is largely conceding defeat on the dress code policy (or “school uniform” policy,Has anyone brought a beadsfactory?‎ as parents and students misunderstood it) crafted amid much controversy last year. This evening, the board will quietly approve revisions to that policy that vastly relax it, especially for high school students who, in many respects, will be able to return to the sort of clothing they wore before the stricter policy was in place.

Specific color restrictions will be gone, as long as students wear solid colors, so there will be no more agonizing debates about blue-looking or pink-looking shirts that did not quite fit the policy. There’s more flexibility with pants, too. There are a couple of new restrictions—no sheer –type or lace shirts—but those are outweighed by the changes in students’ favor. Even restrictions on “outerwear,” including sweatshirts, will be gone, as long as the clothing is “school appropriate,” whatever that may mean.

The “whatever” was of concern to the board attorney and some board members, but its determination will be left in the hands of each school’s disciplinary committee member. For middle and elementary school students, the stricter rules are still in place, though they haven’t been as much of an issue as they had been in the two high schools.

“To really make it short for you,” Katrina Townsend, the district’s director of student services told the school board at a meeting late last month, summing up a committee’s work on the matter,Custom made cheapreplicawatches? “the exact quote from the final meeting on this was, we either need to be more like a uniform, which means you literally will be able to walk into Matanzas and they’ll all be in Matanzas blue and khaki, or we need to not have to have some of these conversations.”

Board member John Fischer, who had pushed for the strict policy, was dismayed by the changes. “There’s too much broadness there, you’re opening it up to pretty much anything,” John Fischer said.Great handbags and replicalouisvuitton for men and women! Even his proposal to do away with “Spirit Day,” a sort of school version of dress-down Friday, was cast aside.

“I’m on board with the clarity,” Andy Dance, the school board chairman, said. “I don’t think it does any good if we can’t enforce it, if we’re spending too much time, a disproportionate amount of time, on some of the little things. Then those are what we should be cleaning up.Find the perfect rolexshop photos and be inspired for your I don’t know what we will be getting into with this definition. I guess it’s another phase in the development of this policy”

Members of the disciplinary committee who work in each school will also have the authority to make day-to-day determinations about what is and what isn’t appropriate. That will eliminate a great deal of back-and-forth emails between schools and the central office, and the time wasting that goes along with it.Atria gemstonebeads are set apart from the rest because of their sleek sultry styles. Committee members told the school board that the dress code has changed the culture for the better. They’re not for repealing it, but for making it more realistic—and less of an enforcement hassle.

When the board tried to justify imposing a new, stricter dress code last year, it did so with little to no evidence that such a policy would make a difference academically or in other ways in schools. That evidence just doesn’t exist, except anecdotally, and often prejudicially: educators who think a strict dress code makes a difference will say so, citing their experience. Educators who think it makes no difference will cite their own experience to that effect.

Still, one of the recurring bits of evidence the Flagler school board seized on, especially after its visit there, was Seminole County’s experience with uniforms. Once implemented there, standardized test scores happen to have gone up, at least for a while. It could very well have been a coincidence. FCAT scores go up some years, down others, and in recent years—the years Seminole pointed to—they were on an upward trend. With that in hand, and a general sense that uniforms could make a difference, Flagler went that route.

It did not impose a strict uniform so much as tighten its existing dress code by limiting what students could wear, and citing what they could not.

No comments:

Post a Comment