COEUR D’ALENE- The Coeur d’Alene School District approved a new dress code policy Monday.
Students at schools like Lake City High School claim the old dress code policy was difficult to enforce.
“If you asked a hundred different people what’s appropriate attire for school apparel, you’d probably get 90 different answers,” Trent Derrick, the Assistant Superintendent for Coeur d’Alene Public Schools (CDA Public Schools), said.
Derrick told NonStop Local this policy has been a long time in the making.
In recent school years, the District would send out surveys to middle and high school students to get insight into the biggest issues that affect them.
“We wanted to get a lot of input from our students. And this is kind of exciting to us, because it is one of the things they are most affected by…obviously…student dress,” Derrick said.
The Student Advisory Group (SAG) for CDA Public Schools also sent out surveys for the last three years.
“…the top two issues in our buildings reported by students were dress code and mental health,” Luke Sharon, a senior at Lake City High School and the Chair of SAG, said.
SAG wanted to take a large step at addressing dress code concerns raised by their peers.
Starting last school year, SAG and the District worked on this policy that would affect dress code.
They wanted a code that was more gender neutral, instead of almost exclusively focusing on female attire.
The policy does include new rules, including, but not limited to:
Students must wear clothing that covers private regions of the body.Undergarments must be worn, but must not be visible.School staff will discreetly inform a student if they are out of dress code.The student will not be referred to as a “distraction” for violating the dress code.Students shall not be removed from a class as a consequence of violating their attire.
“We don’t want to take students out of the instructional time. What that means is if I’m wearing something that could be against this new dress code…this teacher is going to wait until a passing period. Or, administration is going to handle that in between class periods, instead of taking that kid out of class and making them lose some class time,” Sharon said.
Sharon claims that students support the idea of a new dress code, because they realize that the former policy had “arbitrary rules.”
“It’s [the previous dress code] very focused on our female students,” Sharon said.
