Mrs. Griego scheduled a meeting with specific students for Friday including me because she wanted to know what we think of changing our dress code to uniforms. It's informed that she received an e-mail from the school board that they are highly considering changing all the high school's dress code, to uniforms only, but they want to analyze an experiment and test out our school first; Since it is the newest high school.
The school board believes that if doing this drastic change in all high schools, our testing scores would shoot up and it will stop a lot of insecurity and discomfort that lots of students experience at their high school years. Even though their points are clear, they are not stated as clear facts. Therefore, you cannot be sure that this "experiment" will work. When we're in Elementary school and Middle school it is required for us to were uniforms for a variety of purposes. Some which include, helping prevent Gangs from forming on Campus, it encourages discipline for the children, it helps students resist peer pressure to buy trendy clothes, it helps identify intruders in the school so we know that the child is safe, it diminishes economic and social barriers between students, it increases a strength of belonging and school pride and over-all it improves the child's school attendance.
All of these reasons are very helpful in the child's learning development to grow into young adulthood, but once your out of middle school and going into high school it's a whole new cycle of life for the child. High school is an open door to determine the rest of your life. You learn to be more mature, and make decisions on your own to start determining your future. Since Atrisco Heritage Academy is such a college-prep school, and they want us to behave more like young adults, making us wear uniforms would be totally irrelevant. Wearing school uniforms can't make our test scores go up, because it's not like our uniforms are going to have brains in them, or give us answers. The only way to improve our test scores is by us the students because the teachers can only do so much. Students make the decisions of either spending the night studying and eating a good breakfast to prepare themselves for testing, or ditching it all to go hang out with their friends or boyfriends and girlfriends. Students know that if they need help in a subject for example math, they should go during lunch or after school to their teachers or ENLACE to tutor them. We as students have all the materials to help us succeed with testing, it is only up to us to use those materials wisely, no uniform can determine that.
Uniforms have other strong opponents. They are not going to stop student violence, in fact it's just like putting a band-aid on the issue of school violence. Uniforms are an easy target for bullies from other schools to track you down. Also, they are not just a financial burden for poor families that cannot afford school uniforms they also impact on additional expense for parents who pay taxes for a free public education. Some kid's families are just not as fortunate as others and for them it's like selling an arm to be buying uniforms for their children, not including the families that have up to three kids or more going to high school at the same time. They can't just buy one, they have to, but a few pair of uniforms for each child, and with the economy today it will just add another white hair to their heads.
Finally I believe that uniforms in high school violate completely the student's right to freedom of expression. How can you show your own unique style out in the world, if everyone has to look exactly like everyone? If the purpose is to be young adults I think we are grown up enough to know what is right to wear. Since this will be brand new, it would be very difficult to enforce in Public High Schools, because everyone is so used to wearing what they please, and when a high school student is against something they will make some noise about it!
To wrap it all up, what I am trying to say is that this is simply a bad idea. The school board really needs to review all the kids point of view and listen to their voice. It would cost more and just be more trouble to get everyone settled into the uniform policy then to just leave stuff as they are. So just let it be, it's a dress code so people don't just come literally however they want, but they do get to put some of their style into it.
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