While the past year has been hard for just about everyone, parents and teachers have had a particularly rough time wondering when and if it can be safe for children to return to their classes.
And while many have done their best to provide at least some sense of normalcy to the situation, inconsistent reopening policies and the emergence of COVID-19 variants have left schools in a similarly uncertain situation to 2020.
And in response to what one mom sees as an insufficient school policy to address our new reality, she’s deciding to use their logic against a different common school policy that has had students up in arms for years.
But while this mom is no fan of school dress codes, that’s really not what her letter is about.
The mom we’re about to hear from hails from Hamilton County in Tennessee and her letter is aimed directly at its school board.
And that has to do with a discrepancy between the board website’s stated policy that face masks are “a must” for students and reports from the Chattanooga Times Free Press that parents are being granted the ability to opt their children out of this policy.
So since it’s apparently that easy to get around supposedly mandatory school policies, the mom figured she could do the same for the dress code.
In a letter that was posted to Twitter by The Tennessee Holler , the mom requested a “parent opt out form” to make her daughter exempt from her school’s dress code.
As she put it, “I find the school’s dress code policy to be misogynistic and detrimental to the self-esteem of young women.”
She said that rather than shaming young women into covering their bodies, she believes we should empower students to have agency over them by wearing what’s comfortable to them.
The letter can be seen in full here but one sentence in particular especially encapsulates why she wrote it.
In her words, “In light of the opt-out option related to the recently announced mask mandate, I can only assume that parents are now in a position to pick and choose the school policies to which their child should be subject.”
And so if a school official denies this request, they would presumably have to explain why they aren’t also blocking parents from opting out of mask mandates.
Because while her letter does express her genuine feelings about school dress codes, they aren’t her letter’s main focus.
As she told Raw Story, “My goal is to draw attention to the importance of mask usage in our schools. We need to base decisions around this issue on medical data and be guided by the recommendations of experts in this area.”
That said, she also told the outlet that she is happy to actually take the fight to dress codes once the mask policy is no longer an issue.
What do you think of her letter? Let us know in the comments!
