Henrico student starts petition to abolish dress code

A high school student started a petition to abolish the dress code in Henrico County Public Schools, and it had garnered more than 1,150 signatures as of Oct. 4.

Sydney Smith, a senior at Glen Allen High School, said that the dress code objectifies women and targets people of color. The 17-year-old addressed the Henrico School Board at its Sept. 23 meeting with her concerns.

“Dress codes teach women from a young age that their body should be hidden and that they shouldn't feel comfortable in the clothes they choose to express themselves in. Is that really a message we want to send to our generation who's trying to create change?” Smith asked the board members. “Male teachers shouldn't be able to comment on students' bodies in any capacity. It's inappropriate, and it's sometimes predatory.”

Smith conducted a voluntary survey at her school, and the responses from more than 250 students who participated showed that female students were three times as likely to get dress-coded. Of the males who were dress coded, 44% were Black, 38% were minorities and 18% were white, according to Smith.

It's impossible to know whether Smith's anecdotal survey is reflective of actual dress-code trends throughout the school district, because HCPS does not aggregate dress code violation data by gender or ethnicity, and the state education department does not collect data about dress code violations, either.

“Sometimes you see Black people get dress-coded for wearing a bandana because it's associated with gang affiliation, versus with white people where they don't even blink an eye,” Smith said in an interview with the Citizen.

William Noel, HCPS’s director of disciplinary review, said that any language in the dress code that was subjective, or gender or ethnic specific was removed from the code two years ago.

“The dress code, which I'm responsible for, definitely does not discriminate based on your gender or even your body size,” Noel said. “If it's a situation where you have a Caucasian student and an African-American student wearing the same thing or the same style of clothing, and the African-American student is picked out, then we need to look at other things that may be going on.”

Kali Bickford, a Henrico student, said  “it’s always been a running joke amongst us girls at Glen Allen ‘who will be the first sent to the office’ when we arrive at school.”

According to Smith, there are often times when a white girl and a Black girl are wearing similar outfits, and the Black girl gets dress-coded while the white student gets complimented by teachers.

“At Glen Allen, our teachers are predominately white,” Smith said. “White people will always have implicit bias whether they want to believe it or not, so that could be it as well.”

Across the HCPS school division, 80% of full-time teachers are white, according to 2019 school data, and 16% are Black. Meanwhile, the majority of HCPS students are Black at 36% of the population, followed by white students at 35%, according to 2020 data from the state education department.

Ideally, Smith wants to eliminate the dress code.

“When we go to college, our bodies are more developed then and there's not a dress code when you go to class, and they learn perfectly fine,” Smith said. “So why are we sexualizing minors?”

The decision to get rid of the dress code is in the hands of the school board.

“As the director of this office, I would probably not be in favor of getting rid of it,” Noel said. “If there are things that need to be tweaked, I'm certainly in favor of that, but I wouldn't want any sort of free reign because you could have students coming in with offensive messages on clothing or racist messages on clothing or promoting drug use and alcohol use. And we don't want that.”

The HCPS dress code prohibits hats, clothing that reveals undergarments, clothing that is see-through, revealing the midriff (while sitting or standing), or resembles undergarments.

Students across the county responded to Smith’s petition with their own personal experiences.

“I wore the exact same shirt as a friend of mine who has smaller (breasts) and I got dress-coded by the same teacher who complimented her outfit,” one student wrote.

“I was walking with my friend who is a (person of color) and she immediately got dress-coded for wearing a crop top,” one male student wrote. “I was wearing one as well and the teacher said nothing to me.”

“They dress-coded me in shorts and not a white girl who was wearing booty shorts,” wrote another student.

Noel said that the school division is actively looking at the dress code to make sure it’s fair to everyone. Each year, Noel solicits feedback from administrators and the Henrico community about any changes that may be needed in the dress code.

“I think where we are now, we're in a pretty pretty solid place because I'm looking at it and I don't see anything that's ethnically or [gender-related] biased against anyone,” Noel said.

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Anna Bryson is the Henrico Citizen's education reporter and a Report for America corps member. Make a tax-deductible donation to support her work, and RFA will match it dollar for dollar.