Girl Stripped Of Honor Society Title Because Bare Shoulders Matter More Than Brains
Imagine working hard during your whole high school career toward a goal. Imagine putting in extra work, fighting for what you want — and finally achieving the dream you’ve been aiming for, only to have it snatched away immediately afterward for literally the barest provocation.
According to Yahoo! Parenting, Cameron Boland is a high school junior at Florida’s Ft. Meyers High School with a long list of impressive notes on her resume. She’s the captain of the school basketball team, the student body president, and a National Honor Society member. In fact, she served as her school’s NHS historian, but had her sights set even higher: on the NHS historian position for the entire county.
At the county NHS meeting, which was located at another high school in the area, Boland, who was running unopposed, won her coveted position, and gave her speech to thank the student electorate. Just one problem: she happened to be wearing a dress with spaghetti straps when she did. Within an hour of her thanking her peers for her victory, officials had tracked her down and revoked her new title. The same thing happened to the young woman who won the position of NHS president, although unlike Boland, she declined to be named in the news coverage.
Yes, for giving a single speech (during an off-campus event to which Boland drove herself) during a Florida summer in a sleeveless dress, Boland was stripped of the honor she’d earned. The normal punishment listed in the student handbook is to have the ‘offending’ student’s parent contacted, but the district officials declined to back off their disciplinary-consequences leap, even when Boland offered to put on a jacket and go back on stage to apologize to the rest of the honor society — not that she should have had to apologize in the first place, as far as I’m concerned.
According to those officials, they had no choice because some other students had ‘complained’ about Boland’s attire; but here’s the thing: as a school official, you don’t have to do something because a whiny teenager tells you to. Also, if kids really did complain, those kids are pedantic jerks who should use their NHS talents to fight unjust dress codes instead of using them to knock down successful peers.
We’ve seen a lot of terrible dress code stories this year, but this one really takes the proverbial cake. It raises the question: what is the actual point of discipline here? What is the goal, and what do these officials want Boland and her classmates to learn? Because it looks like what they’re trying to teach her is that no amount of work and dedication is enough to stop you from being perceived as a piece of meat on display for teenage boys to slaver over.
(Image: tioloco / iStock / Getty)
