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Parry McCluer High School’s principal, Todd Jones, has been working throughout the past year with a committee comprised of students, teachers, and parents to revise the school’s dress code. Jones believes their efforts have developed a more concise and positive dress code for students and teachers.
Jones presented the proposed dress code to the Buena Vista School Board at its regular meeting in June.
The need to revisit the dress code arose after administration received some negative input from parents concerned about the current dress code. Subsequently, Jones formed the dress code committee at random from a pool of interested students, teachers and parents. On this team were two students – one female and one male; two parents – both parents of female students; and two teachers, Jones told the School Board.
The group convened three times during the first semester of the school year. They began by reviewing dress codes at neighboring high schools, including such as Rockbridge County, Bath County, Riverheads High School, Mountain View and Bedford County.
“What we tried to do was take the best things out of each one of those and apply them to ours and take what we liked about ours and kept that, and the things we didn’t like about ours, the committee wanted to make those changes,” Jones said.
Upon reviewing the dress codes at the other high schools, Jones and the committee established three areas of concern with the PMHS dress code. The first was the use of language such as “sexually provocative,” which was not included in any other dress codes the committee reviewed. Jones noted that the committee felt these terms were inappropriate and wanted to exclude them entirely.
The committee also wanted the new code’s language to be more positive and inclusive as to not target some students more than others. Jones gathered feedback from randomly selected students and teachers, many of whom commented on their appreciation of the code’s positive language.
Jones reviewed some of the teachers’ comments for the Board. “I think the proposal looks okay,” wrote one teacher. “I appreciate [that] the verbiage is all inclusive and doesn’t see as far geared towards females as the original one.”
Another teacher wrote, “I reviewed [the proposed dress code] and I think it looks good. I like the positive wording and I think the expectations are appropriate.”
Clarification was the third priority for the committee to ensure that students know exactly what is expected of them. To help with this, the proposed dress code includes visual aids. The committee is currently borrowing the diagram used by RCHS of which PMHS administration will modify to meet their own code’s standards.
“Rockbridge uses the picture for clarification from students and we could use something similar to this to help guide and to ensure that our students, our parents, and our teachers know exactly how the dress code is supposed to be interpreted,” Jones told the School Board. “That was a big selling point on [clarification] when reviewing the dress code. Everybody on the committee really liked the visual element to provide clarification for families.”
The visual aid depicts the correct and incorrect articles of clothing to wear in school. It also includes descriptions explaining why the clothes are correct or incorrect. For example, the picture says, “[The] entire area from armpit to armpit to bottom of three-inch inseam must be covered.”
Jones noted that in some of the comments received by students they asked for more clarity, especially pertaining to the length of shorts and holes in jeans. Overall, the principal received positive feedback making him feel comfortable with using this dress code for the 20232024 academic year.
The School Board will be reviewing and voting on this proposed dress code at its regular meeting in July.
