Shhh, It's a secret!

Radical

I have some stuff on my mind at the moment...

The refinancing of our mortgage is still there for sure and will be till I have the check in my hot little hands.

The bigger thing on my mind right now is school uniforms.

My son goes to a public grammar school that is about a block and a half from our house. He does very well there , is well behaved and generally likes to go to school. Overall our public school system in town, while far from perfect, is probably one of the top three rated systems in the state. It does have it's problems like lack of funding, older buildings requiring much maintenance, teachers union problems etc. Many schools have these problems. Many others have problems we don't like gangs, out of control students, drugs, violence, low test scores, low graduation rates.

In the last 10 or so years, public school systems have been turning to mandating school uniforms which purportedly help to alleviate some of the larger problems like low test scores, violence, out of control students, gangs and discipline problems. (Please note that the problems I just mentioned are not problems in our school district.)

Our school district has decided to mandate school uniforms for students in our district beginning with the fall 2006 semester without the option for parents to opt-out their children from the program. Now, I can understand, perhaps, maybe instituting school uniforms ALONG with other measures if our district had serious problems with gangs, violence and discipline etc. but why start this if we don't have these problems? There have been numerous studies that show improvements, if any, are not attributable to requiring school uniforms. In effect, they can't be proven to help OR hurt.

Now, I'm far from rich and, in fact, live from paycheck to paycheck most of the time. Requiring me and the rest of the parents in the district that are having a hard time making ends meet be required to spend $140 additionally per student on clothing every time they wear out or grow out of clothes is a real punch in the budgetary gut. $140 might not sound like a ton of money to some people if they think that it's just replacing clothes they would have bought for school already. Ahh but that is not the case, remember, the children still need to wear clothes when they get home from school (they are not going to wear uniforms all day!) so the cost of the uniforms IS IN ADDITION to what we already have to spend on our kids clothes so it's not really replacing clothes - it's adding to the wardrobe.

I have a real problem with this and other ways that the district is implementing this. My wife and I are incensed enough that she went to the school board meeting the other night (along with about 200 other parents) to voice our concerns. The school board voted in favor anyway and just let the parents vent at the meeting and ignored them.

My wife asked that since we will be sending our son to school without a uniform but in nice, new, clean, well fitting clothes in the fall, what would the school administration do with him? The answer was: "We don't know but a letter will be sent home to the parents first and eventually, the child will be suspended." Okay, my wife almost lost it at that point, and was noted in the local paper as saying something like, "My son will not wear a uniform, and you can suspend him, and I will get a lawyer."

We are not alone in this upcomming fight. We are pooling our resources to fight this with my wife's sister (she has 2 kids in the district and the uniform's cost will really hurt them) and trying to get other parents to work together with us. We are going to contact a lawyer who specializes in this type of thing and we are also goign to contact the local ACLU to see if they want in on it.

Are we wrong to be so upset by this? My brother seems to think so. He thinks we should go ahead and buy the uniforms dress the kid in it and be happy about it.

My wife and I are very afraid of how this will affect our somewhat sensitive 9 year old if it gets to the point where the school administration disciplines him and singles him out this coming fall. We don't want to hurt him but we want to stand up for and protect our rights (his too). I intend to explain it to him in great detail and to have him ready to be brave and stand up proudly to the teachers and principal. If one of them berates him or talks down to him in any way I will slap a law suit on them so fast their head will spin like a possessed teenager!

posted by section306g @ 7:38 PM