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After three years, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) settled their lawsuit against Classical Charter Schools of America in North Carolina for $1.456 million. the initial case was brought by parents and children at the school who challenged the school’s mandatory “skirts only” rule for girls. During the ACLU’s investigation into the school’s policy, the school shared that their uniform decision was based on the belief that every girl is a “fragile vessel” and that by wearing skirts they were promoting “chivalry.”
“We thought that [logic around girls wearing skirts] Ultimately, it harms all students and sends the message to many, especially girls, students of color, and LGBTQ+ students, that they do not belong there,” says ACLU attorney Jennesa Calvo-Friedman. teen fashion.
Uniform sex-based protocols are an arbitrary tactic that continually alienates gender non-conforming students and severely limits the self-expression of young people.
“Something we hear over and over again from students and parents is that conforming to someone else’s idea of what it means to be a boy or a girl or how people should act or behave in terms of gender really has nothing to do with students’ ability to learn,” says Calvo-Friedman. “And it’s surprising how much energy, attention and resources some schools are willing to put into enforcing these very rigid limits when there are so many other learning-based goals to focus on.”
Enforcing these archaic systems pushes students to prioritize their clothing over their education. Bella Booth attended the Classical Charter Schools of America and often struggled with the skirt requirement while she was growing up. She preferred to wear pants, but was told not to. She was just nine years old when some students rallied to roll back the skirts-only rule. Now, at eighteen, she realizes how much he affected her.
“As a woman, you have long hair and you wear a skirt,” Booth says. teen fashion about what she was taught to believe because of her school’s dress code. “And I guess that’s what I thought was accepted or expected because she was little. That was your stereotypical example of what a woman looks like, because that’s what we were taught.”
the school’s strict policies on what girls and boys are supposed to wear forced Booth to reevaluate her education and her perspective on society’s standards. “[These gender-based uniforms] “They give you an expectation of what a genre is supposed to be like when you’re a kid and I had to deconstruct what I was taught there,” he says.
the charter school also agreed to remove the requirement that children have short hair in response to a separate incident in which the school reportedly told a member of the Waccamaw Siouan tribe that her son’s hair, worn long by Waccamaw Siouan men and boys for thousands of years, it was a “fad” and needed to be eliminated.
Gender-based uniforms, although traditionally minded, still exist today. the ACLU recently launched a meeting form Collect stories from people who have encountered dress and appearance policies at their school or workplace that treated them differently based on gender stereotypes. Its objective is to remind the general public that this is a form of discrimination that will not go unnoticed.
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