There Shouldn't Be School Uniforms in Public Schools Anyway

Washoe County School District is merely saving face by proposing a "uniform policy" after having its ass handed to them in a pair of lawsuits. The state supreme court has yet to rule on the matter, but the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled in the plaintiffs' favor regarding the motto.

The principal involved in the lawsuit will not be returning to Roy Gomm next year. Her job was up for bid for transfers.

The draft of the new policy also says the uniform policy must be evaluated every four years. A minimum of 25 percent of families having students at the school must respond to change the policy. To cancel a school's uniform policy, 51 percent of families with children who attend the school must want to change.

No other changes to school uniforms can occur within four years without Superintendent approval.

Glutton for More Legal Challenges

Washoe County School District, bruising from lawsuits over mandatory school uniforms and mottoes, is working on a new uniform policy.

They shouldn't even have mandatory school uniforms in the first place although they are supposedly legal as it has been decided in the court system.

Still, the district wants to give principals way too much leeway on what to do and would clash with court rulings. Stupid, stupid, stupid:

In the new policy, uniforms may only have the school's logo and name on the uniform. No other language would be allowed on the uniform.

This new policy would clash with the current legal battle and uniforms at Roy Gomm Elementary School.

Last month the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded a decision made two years ago by U.S. District Court Judge Robert C Jones, who dismissed a suit by parents who objected to the Gomm uniform policy.

Frudden v. Pilling Update

No surprise at all attorney Mary Frudden and her husband, represented by lawyer Eugene Volokh, won their appeal to the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

The Gomm uniform case has been remanded to the local court.

The Fruddens will win their separate case before the Nevada Supreme Court. That I am confident will happen.

Today the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed and remanded a decision made two years ago by U.S. District Court Judge Robert C Jones, who dismissed a suit by parents who objected to Roy Gomm Elementary School's uniform policy.

"We hold that the Roy Gomm Elementary School policy compels speech because it mandates the written motto, 'Tomorrow's Leaders,' on the uniform shirt," wrote Judge Jacquelin Nguyen who wrote the opinion from the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals.

"Further, the exemption for uniforms for nationally recognized youth organizations such as the Boy Scouts and Girls Scouts on regular meeting days is content based. For these reasons, we conclude that strict scrutiny review applies," Nguyen wrote.

This is what happens when a school district gives principals too much leeway on decision-making. The principals are simply too ignorant of the law to proceed without consulting attorneys first. I knew the district was going to get hauled off into court the minute Sparks MS decided to go the uniform route.

Uniforms have no business in public schools, period, even though another court said it was legal.

Volokh writes about the decision here.

More About the School Uniform Court Case

I doubt there is video available like there is with the Ninth Circuit, but once again it appears WCSD doesn't have a leg to stand on although you never know with courts. Few judges have any idea whatsoever how much power principals have, and they don't even have to follow the law:

Randy Drake, chief general counsel for the Washoe County School District, countered during the hearing that state law gives principals authority to impose uniforms. About 30 schools in Washoe County now require uniforms, he said.

Justice Kristina Pickering questioned the purpose of the state education statute if everybody already had power to impose a uniform policy.

“It is arguable if there is going to be a uniform policy, it has to be adopted by the board of trustees,” Pickering said.

What's the damned point of the law if it's going to be flouted anyway? But welcome to the wonderful world of school district policies, where the law takes a backseat to the whims of administrators.

Frudden v. Pilling

It looks like school uniform plaintiff Mary Frudden is also fighting the mandatory school uniform policy at WCSD's Roy Gomm ES to the state supreme court. It appears this is a separate legal "track" arguing a different case than the one that was argued recently in front of the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals. She argues principals and other groups that are NOT school boards do NOT have authority under Nevada law to impose uniforms. The Ninth Circuit case talked only about mottos:

More About Roy Gomm Uniforms

A few parents who favor what I consider an illegal mandatory uniform policy are upset because the woman who is challenging the policy in federal court is on an advisory committee regarding uniform policies.

I think they know deep down that the policy is going to be struck down by the 9th Circuit in one capacity or another.

The district should have run the whole thing past some attorneys before allowing principals to do whatever they wanted. It would have saved the taxpayers a ton of money.

Roy Gomm Case

The mandatory school uniform case is being argued today at Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I would think there is a good chance the mandatory uniforms in some WCSD schools will be thrown out because such policies violate students' freedom of expression, especially when that uniform has a motto.

Since it is the Ninth Circuit hearing the case, the parents have a much better chance prevailing on appeal than perhaps a different circuit appellate court.

Snip:

The Fruddens’ appeal is now being argued by Eugene Volokh, a lawyer and professor at UCLA School of Law.

In the opening brief, Volokh argues that the Gomm policy is “not content-neutral dress policy because it provides an exemption for uniforms of nationally recognized youth organizations such as Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts.”

Volokh, who argues First Amendment cases around the country, said he called the Fruddens and offered his service pro bono after reading about the case when it appeared in an online legal query he follows.

“The trial courts there decided it wasn’t a First Amendment issue to have a motto on their shirt that students are required to wear,” Volokh said of the case.

The district is arguing that the mandatory uniforms are "content-neutral," and therefore the First Amendment doesn't apply.

We will see how this goes.

The Roy Gomm School Uniform Lawsuit

will head to court on Monday. I hope the parents prevail because it IS a violation of the First Amendment:

Just before the uniform policy started in the fall of 2011, Mary Frudden, a Reno-based attorney, filed a federal lawsuit saying the policy violated her children’s civil rights. The children did not wear the school uniforms for two weeks during the start of the 2011-12 school year or the 2012-13 school year.

Pilling said she followed the district’s disciplinary policy on uniforms and asked the Frudden children to change and began a series of punishments including shortened recess time and detention. The students wore uniforms to school when Pilling threatened suspension.

The case is garnering some national First Amendment interest.

There isn't any evidence at all school uniforms in public schools do anything to help discipline. Just because private schools often have them doesn't mean public schools should.

After all, you have that pesky First Amendment to worry about, and public schools receive taxpayer money. Clothing has been long regarded as a form of expression, of free speech. Of course it isn't absolute. Schools can regulate for safety reasons and for reasons having to do with distractions. Mandatory school uniforms, however, are forbidden.

It's like WCSD didn't run these willy-nilly principal ideas by outside attorneys to see if school uniforms are legal. They aren't in public schools. It's a no-brainer here. Furthermore, the district didn't even have a policy about uniforms; the principals did whatever the heck they wanted, and quite honestly, the reason they put those uniforms in there in the first place is so administrators wouldn't have to worry about enforcing dress codes, especially in middle and high schools. This wasn't because it was cheaper for students, or better for discipline, or anything other than administrator convenience.

I hope the Fruddens prevail.

Etc.

This is why charter schools are NOT public schools:

Yet the nearby charter school has what’s called “selective enrollment,” which means if a kid misbehaves they can kick him out and off he goes to Jenna’s school. Public schools, of course, have to accept every student. Every time you hear of a charter school touting its unbelievable results, just remember this: Their primary “innovation” is that they don’t have to take the kids who can’t hack it. It’s that simple.

“If I could hand select my kids, of course it would make me look like a fantastic teacher,” said Jenna. “But that’s not public education."

Taxpayer money should NOT be going toward them.
_____

This monkey looks a lot more like Tony Bennett than it looks like Paul Ryan or any other human or near-human you can think of.
_____

The New York Times and Washington Post, both on the take from the billionaire "reformers," continue to bash teachers and peddle unworkable "evaluations" as if teaching is the problem with poverty.

The NYT took the excellent journalist Michael Winerip off the education beat, so now it is back to its irresponsible propaganda trashing public education.

These experts have said over and over and over that the method by which test scores are factored into an evaluation of how effective a teacher is are dramatically unreliable and unfair. Some say it will destroy the teaching profession because it will identify effective teachers as ineffective and ineffective teachers as effective. Some bad teachers will be fired but some good ones will too. Others will leave in disgust.

That’s what happened, for example, in New York City when Carolyn Abbott, who teaches mathematics to seventh- and eighth-graders at the Anderson School, a citywide gifted-and-talented school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, learned that her “value-added” score made her the worst eighth grade teacher in the entire city. The score of course didn’t reflect that her students already scored near 100 percent proficiency and were doing advanced math — but the formula didn’t care.

The value-added formulas actually compare how students are predicted to perform on the state ELA and math tests, based on their prior year’s performance, with their actual performance, as Teachers College Professor Aaron Pallas wrote here. Teachers whose students do better than predicted are said to have “added value”; those whose students do worse than predicted are “subtracting value.” By definition, he wrote, about half of all teachers will add value, and the other half will not.

_____

At least the disgraced former principal of Sparks Middle School (Nevada) wasn't mentioned at all in this piece about the new Reed High School mandatory uniforms. However, the article is a bit slanted.

Etc.

The embroidery business is booming in Reno thanks to putting the finishing touches on those made-in-China uniforms.
_____

The lack of REAL dental insurance, and not those piddling benefits employers offer that pay hardly nothing thanks to annual limits, is a national scandal.

For-profit companies, as mentioned previously on this blog, are up to their eyeballs in this.

Necessities should never be subject to the profit motive.
_____

Well, Glenn, you rip what you sew.
_____

It would likely take a miracle for top racehorse Paynter, winner of the Haskell Invitational, to survive this very, very serious bout with laminitis, the same disease that caused Secretariat to be put down in 1989.

Paynter developed colitis, but then he ended up with laminitis in three of his four legs.

I would say the chances of survival are not good.

In a Dairy, the Cream Rises to the Top,

but in public education, the crap also rises.

The article is about one of the Reno-Sparks area high schools, Reed High School, implementing a dress code involving mandatory school uniforms. As I have written about on this blog, the district is being sued over it in a case involving a different school. The plaintiffs in that case have appealed it to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. I hope they win. Mandatory uniform policies in public schools are clearly unconstitutional.

My outrage is because the person they quote in the article is the disgraced former principal of Sparks Middle School who was not only NOT an administrator at Reed High School, he was a mere PLATO teacher, which is an online credit recovery program. He gets this big write-up in the paper and gets a district make-work job when he should have lost his career and had his license yanked.

Washoe County School District continues to prove it is a corrupt shithole unworthy of support.