CALIFORNIA — A California superior court Monday scrapped the
dress code at Redwood Middle School, citing the Supreme Court's affirmation of
basic student expression rights in the recently decided "Bong Hits 4 Jesus"
case.
The school's ban on all pictures, logos, words, stripes and
patterns had landed a seventh-grader in the principal's office for wearing socks
displaying Tigger, the character from Winnie the Pooh.
Students were also
disciplined for wearing an American Cancer Society ribbon pin, a heart sticker,
jeans and T-shirts reading "Jesus Freak" and “D.A.R.E. to keep kids off
drugs,” according to court documents.
The dress code, intended to
obstruct gang activity, had permitted only solid-color blue, white, green,
yellow, khaki, gray, brown and black, according to the school's Web site.
"I don't really think it's fair at all," said Toni Kay Scott, now 16,
who wore the Tigger socks two years ago, when a security officer escorted her
and two friends to the principal's office before sending them to in-school
suspension. "They say that it's for safety issues, but I think that it's just
because they want to be completely controlling over everything."
The
judge, Raymond Guadagni, enjoined the school from enforcing the dress code,
saying that prohibiting and punishing attire that expresses a political or
religious message violated the First Amendment.
"While it does appear
that at least some of the student plaintiffs merely wish to wear clothes that
express their personality," his decision reads, "the evidence also establishes
that certain clothing and accessories prohibited by the attire policy —
the D.A.R.E. T-shirt, the Jesus Freak T-shirt and the breast cancer awareness
pin — did convey a particularized message subject to First Amendment
protection."
Guadagni's decision quoted the Supreme Court's 1969 ruling
in
Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School and cited last
month's reaffirmation of the
Tinker standard in the "Bong Hits 4 Jesus"
case. "It has long been held that, under the First Amendment to the Constitution
of the United States, student expression is protected, so long as it does not
'materially and substantially disrupt the work and discipline of the school,'"
he wrote. "This well settled principle has just been reconfirmed by the Supreme
Court in
Morse v. Frederick."
California Education Code Section
48907 guarantees students the right to wear "buttons, badges and other insignia"
as part of their free expression, and Section 35183 requires that parents have a
way to opt out of school uniform policies. The school district contends the
dress code is not a uniform.
Toni Kay's mother, Donnell Scott, said she
had tried to opt her daughter out of the policy, but the school refused.
After the Tigger socks, Toni Kay was disciplined again for wearing
sneakers in a forbidden color — pink. Suspecting a double standard, Scott
gave Toni Kay a camera to photograph other students wearing pink shoes and other
dress code violations without being disciplined. "There's no doubt she was being
singled out because I had rocked the boat," Scott said.
Scott said she
resorted to a lawsuit after exhausting her other options. "I did everything I
was supposed to do. I went to the school, I went to the board, and everybody
shut me down, so that’s why we ended up where we did," she
said.
Starting this fall, students will be allowed to wear expressive
messages with parental permission, according to a press release by the American
Civil Liberties Union of Northern California, who helped the six students and
their parents sue the school.
The court gave the school district six
months to revise the policy or allow parents to opt out.
The school
district is "looking into the next steps," the superintendent's assistant
said.
Toni Kay, entering high school in the fall, will have a new dress
code barring spaghetti straps and short shorts, but she said she doesn’t
mind. "I don’t see that as a problem at all," she said. "They're still
giving us our way to express ourselves. They're just setting guidelines for
appropriateness."
By Isaac Arnsdorf, SPLC staff writer
