- April 26, 2024
-
-
Loading
Loading
Last school year, there were 468 discipline referrals at Flagler Palm Coast High School. So far this year, there have been 1,571 referrals. Of them, 1,183 related to dress code violations.
The Flagler County School Board discussed on Tuesday making changes to its dress code to eliminate the ambiguity that resulted from the dress code that was implemented at the start of the 2012-2013 school year.
“We thought you’d be able to look out into a school building and you’d be able to see a sea of kids dressed in uniform,” said Katrina Townsend, director of student services. “Really, what we have is a variety of things, and some of them have become concerns for us.”
Chief among those concerns was shirts made of sheer fabric. This year, schools decided to let students wear sheer shirts as long as they wore the same color shirt beneath it. However, the standards have slackened as the year went on, Townsend said. Now, students are applying the same concept to both lacy shirts and to shirts with lace cutouts in the back or along the shoulders.
The District Discipline Review Committee recommended that it change the language in its policy to say that students must wear shirts of solid color and fabric, eliminating all sheer materials and lace fabrics from campuses.
With that recommendation came a suggestion of loosening current color policy. Currently, students must wear shirts representing the colors of their respective schools. But that has created problems, Townsend said, because there are many different shades of the same color, leaving uniform decisions up to the interpretation of discipliners.
The DDRC recommended that high school students be allowed to wear any color of shirt, as long as it fits the current standards for collars. Patterned clothing would not be allowed. By Townsend’s recommendation, there would be no changes to the color policy for students in kindergarten through eighth grade.
Finally, Townsend said, schools faced challenges with outerwear as it implemented its new policy this year. Administrators had difficulty defining the difference between a “jacket” and a “sweatshirt”; and they first said outerwear with lining was permitted in schools. However, some sweatshirts have fleece linings, causing ambiguity.
And it was difficult for teachers to ask students to remove their jackets or sweatshirts during the colder months, Townsend said. Often, students with embroidered outerwear were told to turn them inside out as they walked between buildings.
Townsend recommended that the School Board extend its outerwear policy to allow all outerwear, including sweatshirts, so long as they are “school appropriate.”
“We have to have ‘school appropriate’ defined,” said School Board member John Fischer. “There’s too much broadness there, I think, that pretty much opens it up to anything.”
Townsend said she will return to the board with a few clarifying sentences as to what is and isn’t appropriate for school, but said she essentially hoped that, save for any articles of clothing depicting or hinting at drugs, alcohol or violence, students would be able to wear whatever they owned.
Board members raised the concern that students would simply wear sweatshirts all day, every day, to avoid the uniform mandates. But Townsend said it didn’t seem practical or fair to ask students to take their jackets or sweatshirts off inside school buildings.
“Those schools can get cold,” she said.
Tuesday’s workshop meeting was a preliminary discussion of potential changes. The School Board will continue to weigh potential changes to the uniform policy at a later date.
Staff also recommended that ...
• clothing worn on spirit days would be restricted to school-branded articles.
• students be allowed to wear hats outside buildings, which is required by state statutes.
• students be prohibited from wearing jewelry that hangs outside their clothing.
• the DDRC be able to make uniform policy decisions on its own so it can address problems as they arise.
• gray and white jeans and pants be allowed to eliminate ambiguity of light-colored khaki pants.
• students wear a belt if their clothing has visible belt loops, but that there is no color requirement for the belt.
