School Announces Dress Code 8 Days Before Prom Because Dresses Grow On Trees
The week leading up to prom should be filled with excitement. Last minute decisions about hairstyles, stupid squabbles with friends over where you’ll take pictures beforehand, picking up flowers. But for one high school in Connecticut, girls are now worried that they won’t be able to go to prom at all. Just eight days before prom night, Shelton High School announced a dress code policy for prom and now many girls are worried their dress won’t make the cut.
This past Friday as part of announcements reminding students about the school’s everyday dress code, the headmaster, Dr. Beth A Smith said girls wearing prom dress with cut-outs, backless gowns and two-piece outfits in which the midriff is exposed would not be allowed into the prom this weekend. If you’ve walked through a department store lately, you know how difficult it is to find a dress that would meet those criteria.
Many students are demanding the school reconsider their policy as most have already purchased prom dresses and had alterations made. Several girls have brought their dresses into school for inspection and have been told they are inappropriate. With less than a week before prom, students will be hard pressed to find another dress before then, let alone the fact that many formal wear dresses are non-returnable.
According to the school, students have known about the school dance dress code and the announcement of last Friday was only a reminder. Shelton Public Schools Superintendent Freeman Burr told FoxNews an explanation appropriate prom attire is in the student handbook which is distributed at the start of the year. However, beyond a vague reference to dressing appropriately the handbook is silent on the issue, stating that further regulations can be found in the dance contract. (The handbook does state “No ”freaking” or sexually explicit dancing will be allowed…” to which I say 1992 called on the landline and they want their word back.) Students claim neither the prom contract nor prom tickets said anything about dress code beyond saying students dressed inappropriately will be denied entry without a refund.
Students plan to pass around a petition today at school in hopes of getting school administration to change their mind. Authored by the The Croffy/Smith siblings, the petition makes some excellent points not only about the unfairness of announcing a policy so close to prom but about school dress codes in general:
Please do not mistake this as a plea for there to be no restrictions or regulations on what students can wear. Having a dress code is perfectly fine so long as it is in place for legitimate reasons and it is equally enforced on all students. There is no reason one girl should wear skirt that is deemed too short and she is removed from class and made to wait for her parent to bring a change of clothes (wasting precious instruction time for this student), but a cheerleader can wear a skirt of the same length or shorter all day without being bothered about it. There is no reason why a boy should be able to sag is [sic] pants well below the waist but a girl will be shamed if her shorts show the slightest bit of her buttock. There is no reason why the boys at Mr. Student Body should have been allowed to parade around the stage in nothing but their boxers but a girl can’t wear a backless dress to prom. This selective enforcement of school dress code is unacceptable.
With only five days until prom hopefully the school and students can come to a speedy resolution that doesn’t involve a lot of girls spending Saturday night at home in sweatpants.
(photo: huntstock.com/Shutterstock)
