It appears that our school board is once again living in the past. While they rush headlong down the path to mandatory school uniforms, other Florida counties that have experimented with uniforms are already abandoning them after studies showed that the uniforms did not "keep students safe or improve their behavior or performance in class."
Check out this article about Broward County's school board voting 7-2 to adopt an opt-out policy that will allow parents to exempt their children from their three-year-old uniform policy.
Broward County is just the latest, however. Almost four years ago, Palm Beach County relaxed its uniform requirements. According to an article in the Sun-Sentinel:
"School uniforms, touted as a solution to discipline problems and low test scores, are falling out of favor in Palm Beach County as parents and administrators discover student skills can improve when they wear plain old T-shirts and jeans.
Several elementary school principals have abandoned the effort to get students to wear the golf-style shirts and khaki shorts they started recommending about five years ago. Their schools' academic performance, as measured by state standardized exams, has progressed without strict dress-code compliance.
Since academic improvement is the school system's primary focus, they wonder if spending time enforcing uniform policies distracts from their main mission.
"We haven't had a whole lot of success with it," said Michael Riley, principal of Lantana Elementary School, which has gotten an A grade from the state for the past two years after three C's and a D in 1999. "Interest has dwindled over the years. I don't see it on the school district level as a priority."
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