Dress Codes with Reason

School dress codes have been one of the most fought over polices that schools enforce.  Granted there are some schools and administrations who take the dress code to extremes by sending girls who are decently dressed home for ridiculous reasons, like collarbones and shoulders showing.  Some school's dress codes can be considered sexist because the action is only taken against the female population of the school.  With that begin said, I am not making this post about the sexism and negativity that goes along with dress codes.  Instead I am going to talk about the positivity about dress codes and why I loved my technical high school's dress code. 

The dress code at my high school was that all students must be decently dressed.  For the girls straps on tops had to be at least three finger widths wide, skirts and shorts had to fall to or longer than your fingertips when your arms are at your sides, and any undergarments could not be showing.  For the guys pants actually had to fit and cover their butts.  Granted there were more rules for the girls than the guys but the school had reason for it.  There are so many more types of clothing for girls than there are for guys.  The school's main use of our dress code was to show students that you can still show your personality through clothes while looking classy.   

As I said above I went to a technical school, so on our academic weeks the dress code was more relaxed. This does not mean that students were given a free pass to wear whatever they wanted.  Girls were still asked to cover up their bra straps if they were showing, because it looks trashy.  Guys were still asked to pull up their pants and use a belt, because no one wants to see a guy's pants at their knees and their underwear hanging out.  If they didn’t have a belt they were either given and extra one from lost and found or a rope from of the shops.  The dress code definitely got stricter on our trade weeks.  While in your shop or trade you had to dress the part; if you were in banking you wore dress clothes appropriate for a bank,  if you were in health or dental assisting you wore scrubs, and in electrical, carpentry, automotive, and plumbing you wore steel toe work boots and either jeans or coveralls.  If you were not wearing the appropriate clothing in shops you were sent to the Dean's office and they would either try to find you something extra or have you sit and work on any academic work you had. 

I loved that my high school's dress code made us take pride in how we dressed and taught us how to dress for the professional word.    If schools used the dress code as a way to show students how to dress in the real world there would be no backlash about what is appropriate or not.  School dress codes should not be about making students feel inferior but about making sure that students are given the chance to show off their personality while looking respectful, both to themselves and their environment.