Profanity and certain dress code violations could lead school officials in New Britain, Conn., to suspend students for up to 10 days, the New Britain Herald reports.
Photo: Flickr/Malingering
Superintendent of Schools Kelt L Cooper announced last week a new anti-profanity policy that calls for students to be suspended for using profane language or for wearing their pants half down in a style that has come to be known as “droopy pants.”
He has even come up with a new motto: “Don’t talk smack and don’t show crack.” Get it?
Droopy pants have been called illegal, a criminal offense, and the worst fashion trend of the century. They’re certainly against the majority of school dress codes around the country. One researcher even tried to get a handle on the underlying motivation for the fashion. Christopher AD Charles, PhD, writes that 20 males in a study who wore saggy pants …
… viewed saggy pants as the preferred and comfortable fashion norm because they grew up seeing it, and watching it on music videos so it was all right to publicly display the creative underwear designs. These participants had the power to determine fashion choices and outcomes in their generation. They bonded with others in good situations by smiling and being nice but some buffered in these situations by being indifferent or sarcastic because they felt that the compliments were fake. They buffered in bad situations by walking away, acting rudely and aggressively, and others code-switched by adjusting their pants. The code-switchers relinquished power and control over fashion outcomes unlike those who buffered.
I invite you to read about a ban on droopy pants by lawmakers in one Florda town, here, which is a little like using the real police and court system to enforce the kind of clothes people wear.
We reported, here, that using police to enforce school rules or break up minor scuffles might ultimately be a bad policy. The same argument has been made against suspensions for nonviolent offenses, here, here, and here, but Mr Cooper considers this style of dress disrespectful to teachers, much like the use of abusive language or cursing. “Enough is enough,” the Herald quoted him as saying.
The new motto reportedly comes from an encounter Mr Cooper had last year with a student with droopy pants and a bad attitude. “I step back and I go ‘Son will you please pull up your pants?’ And he begins to drop the F-bomb at me—blah blah blah—and I’m looking at him and my jaw drops,” WTNH News 8 quoted him as saying.
Editorial
The national trend on suspending students for nonviolent offenses is moving in the opposite direction: suspensions for nonviolent offenses are down. The theory is that it’s better to keep students in school and give them a chance to correct the behavior. It’s the same thing, in my opinion, as taking your child shopping if you don’t like his or her fashion choices. This policy will, in some ways, teach kids who wear droopy pants that classrooms and teachers aren’t worthy of respect, a belief they probably already hold.
Need to think about this one a little bit. I realize school officials in New Britain—and probably the majority of the kids—have had enough of this form of disrespect, and so have I. But several people in Cocoa, Fla., where a ban on the droopy pants was passed, consider it a form of racial profiling, which is not allowed in our public schools. I’m not suggesting we let the behavior go, because a little disrespect often leads to a lot of disrespect, but taking kids out of class for their language or dress, I think, ignores what we have learned about punishing kids.
Furthermore, respect is something that’s earned; it can’t really be legislated. If teachers and other school officials don’t have the time to earn the respect of students, there are deeper problems than whether or not we can see what kind of underwear kids are wearing.
