The Trouble with School Dress Code Exemptions

Many schools offer school dress code exemptions and many do not. Those that do not offer exemptions can tell you that most of the complaints don’t come from students, but parents. Now many parents have good reason for seeking exemptions, but in some cases, as with Tasha M. Gascon-Smith of Palm Beach, Florida, they go too far.

"My husband, he wishes I'd spend my time better, but he knows I'm on the right track," she says. For more than a year now, Gascon-Smith, mother of three, has been waging a war against her kid’s dress code policies. She keeps a folder with all of the correspondence she has had on the issue.

Right about then any one of us would have pulled our kid aside and given them the talk about how sometimes we have to do things that we don’t want to do. But not Gascon-Smith.

After a year of battle, she won’t give in- even though her thirteen year old son spent the last nine weeks of his seventh grade year serving “in-school suspension” for insubordination over his clothes. His mom says it’s the same this year. “He’s probably only been in his regular classes seven to ten days.”

School officials aren’t caving. That’s the trouble with school dress code exemptions. “If we approve one exemption, we have to approve them all.”

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