School Uniform Issue
A Great First Step to Improving Our Nation's Schools The rise of violence in today's schools is being considered the worst threat facing the youth of our nation by many school and health professionals (King 1). School officials search for answers to help improve the environment of their schools, only to see conditions continue to deteriorate. Officials have looked into using more security, turn the school year into an all year program, switching schools into magnet schools, implementing school uniform programs, and some schools have even went to the extreme of adding metal detectors in the main entrances of the school. In 1994 Long Beach Unified School District, in California, became the first major school district in the nation to implement a mandatory school uniform policy. According to an article by Jessica Portner, the policy required 83,000 elementary and middle school students to begin wearing a school uniform. Since then, school officials report a 76% drop in crime from the year before the implementation to the 1996-97 school year. The question is are mandatory school uniform policies the first step in improving the quality of education children in every school across the nation receive today?
Making them feel they have contributed in making their children's school a better place to learn. However, if parents were to do a little research, they would find that the parents from districts, who have implemented school uniform policies, have insisted that a set of three uniforms cost between $70 and $90, being no more expensive than one designer outfit. The worry about uniforms taking away the ability to detect problems in the students' lives is a good point. There is not a argument against implementing uniform policies in our nations schools that can not be shot down by the success these same policies have had in other troubled schools across the nation. In order to make a uniform policy that is hard to fight, the administrators must give the parents the option of not having their child participate in the program. Some teachers worry that when students wear uniforms it will take away an early detection device. I have always had the idea that the nation's youth are our future. Loesch's next and possibly most important move was to go into the community and meet with the parents on their ground. Children with problems like physical/sexual abuse or are getting involved in something that would hurt them like drugs or gangs tend to stop caring how they look in public, therefore if children are in uniforms this kind of detection process will be obsolete (Paliokas and Rist 3). Federal judges are divided on the issue of uniforms infringing on the free expression rights of students. Loesch felt they would get a better turnout to their one on one meetings with the parents than having community meetings in the school. Parents and other opponents are also skeptical about the effect school uniforms will have on the grouping of social classes. Another possible factor that may increase student progress is the fact that students wearing uniforms attend school more often. With all the positive results shown in the troubled school districts having implemented school uniform policies, why don't more school districts across the nation not adopted these policies as well? Many groups and organizations like The American Civil Liberties Union, the nations biggest opponent to school uniform policies, argue that the policies are an infringement on the free expression rights of the students. The reason I believe this program was embraced in the community as it was, was because Loesch and his staff got the parents of the children involved in the decision making process right from the beginning.
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