Bessemer’s officials indicated that its new dress code is allegedly being instituted to ensure student safety, however, according to research, these kinds of rules do not make students feel safe but rather feel like they are being targeted.
Alabama’s Bessemer City High School recently announced a new dress code for its students, which excludes leggings, Crocs, jeans with holes, and bodycon dresses, in addition to standard exclusions like open-toed slides and sunglasses.
According to WBRC, Principal Stoney Pritchett and Counselor Tahuna Thomas shared that their aim with the dress code is to introduce the school’s students to a real-world standard that might exclude items students would rather wear as well as ensure their safety.
As Principal Pritchett told the outlet, “Oftentimes at the high school, we have drills, we have tornado drills, fire drills, and weather drills,” Pritchett said. “We have to line up and go outside and things like that. We want to make sure that kids are safe moving throughout the building. Other things happen as well that the school can’t prevent. We just want to make sure that no one breaks their leg or their ankle because the school is liable, and we want to make sure everyone is safe.”
Although there is nothing in the highlighted rules that seem discriminatory, in 2022, US News & World Report reported that the enforcement of these policies often results in more girls, Black, and other students of color being punished.
As Bessemer’s officials indicated, most dress codes are allegedly instituted to ensure student safety. However, research shows these rules do not make students feel safe but rather feel like they are being targeted.
The Government Accountability Office reported in 2022 that schools that enacted strict dress codes tended to enroll primarily Black and Latinx students. Courtney Mauldin, an assistant professor of educational leadership in the teaching and leadership department at the Syracuse University School of Education, told US News & World Report that it was not surprising to her that this tended to be the case.
“I think that the schools where we see the over-policing of dress and the enforcement of dress codes, it’s not surprising that those are mostly students of color,” Mauldin said. “There’s a lot of traditional, antiquated ideas around what it has to look like to do school. And I think people have good intentions, but they’re very slow to change when it rubs up against what they’ve known.”
Mauldin continued, “Are we actually targeting clothing, or is this specific to targeting a student’s identity? Because if we’re targeting student’s identities, then we’re sending a message that you don’t belong here and you’re disrupting the space simply by being, and that’s not the message that we want to send to students, especially if schools are supposed to be these places of learning and joy and belonging.”
According to the GAO report, “Schools that enforce strict dress codes are associated with statistically significant higher rates of exclusionary discipline—that is, practices that remove students from the classroom, such as in-school suspensions, out-of-school suspensions, and expulsions. This is true even after controlling for student demographics, school type, size, geography, and measures of school climate, such as levels of disorder and the presence of security personnel.”
The report continued, “Research shows exclusionary discipline is associated with short and long-term negative outcomes for students, including increased risk for failing standardized tests and increased rates of dropouts and incarceration. For example, our prior work showed that boys, Black students, and students with disabilities are disproportionately disciplined across discipline types, including exclusionary discipline.
The report also showed Black and Hispanic students are more likely to receive harsher school discipline than their counterparts for the same violation. “One study found that Black students were seven times more likely to receive exclusionary discipline than their White peers. District officials and national organizations we spoke with echoed these findings and raised concerns that, overall, dress codes can exacerbate disparities in school discipline for Black students,” the report cited.
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