Fifth and sixth graders will no longer be allowed to wear skirts to school after the Zachary Community School Board voted Dec. 2 to ban the garments, citing complaints from staff about how much time they spend dealing with girls who disobey the dress code.
The change will take effect 60 days after the board’s vote.
Girls in pre-kindergarten through fourth grades can still wear skirts as long as their hems hit at 3 inches or less above the knee, as stipulated in the school district’s dress code. Skirts are already prohibited in upper grade levels.
The board briefly pondered other options, with a couple of members noting that some children may show up to school in too-short skirts because they’ve had a recent growth spurt — not because they’re intentionally breaking rules. But the board ultimately decided that, to alleviate the burden on staff, getting rid of skirts altogether at Copper Mill Elementary School, which houses Zachary’s fifth and sixth grades, was the way to go.
As board member Marty Hughes put it, “If you can’t follow the rules, then we’ve got to change them.”
Lia White-Allen, Copper Mill’s principal, told the board she is exhausted from constantly policing skirt lengths.
“If I had the support of parents, that would be one thing, but it’s the same group of girls over and over again,” she said. “I’ve gotten to the point now where I’ve actually just pulled back because I don’t have the energy or the time to tell the same girls and write the same girls up every day over and over again.”
School employees do not use rulers to measure the distance between students’ skirt hems and knees.
“If we did that, we would be on the news,” White-Allen said.
Instead, staff has to make judgment calls — which bring their own share of complications.
“One teacher might say ‘This is too short,’ and another teacher might say, ‘You know what? I think it’s OK,’” she said.
White-Allen worries about how the situation is affecting other aspects of student conduct.
“What it has done is kind of crippled my discipline, what I have in place for discipline,” she said, “because they know now that we’ve just thrown our hands up because it’s too much.”
Some board members, though sympathetic to White-Allen’s dilemma and supportive of the dress code revisions, were uneasy with the timing of the request. They asked school leaders to clearly communicate with families and to offer a grace period for violations.
“There’s always a concern when we make changes in the middle of the school year that could impact parents and what they’ve already purchased and potentially be a possible hardship on a family,” said board member Elecia Lathon.
While Superintendent Ben Necaise agreed the mid-year change isn’t ideal, he doesn’t think it will cause any major problems.
“With it being winter, most students aren’t going to wear skirts over the next couple of months anyway,” he said. “And if they’re not wearing skirts, they’re wearing something else, which means they would have something else to wear the rest of the year probably.”