ok I grew up in Framingham Mass. 20 miles outside of Boston.
At the time, it was the largest town in the states.
3 high schools. North, South and tech vocational.
The school system was in the top 100 in the country.
The only time I EVER recall a discussion about high school attire was the biology teacher telling
a girl to wear something over her tube top in her class as it was distracting to the males in the classroom.
I was the male in the classroom. I recall that I heartily disagreed with her decision on that topic.
I miss tube tops.

Remember bell bottoms? In jr high they said the bell couldn't more than 15 inches or some silly number for "safety"
In reality no one cared. We were a liberal suburb of a very liberal city in a very liberal state.

 

My kids all when to an elementary school that required uniforms. There was a vast difference in family income in the school but the uniforms kept all of the kids on a visual equal footing. My kids at first did not like wearing them but after awhile they understood why they wore uniforms.

 

It is always a touchy topic. When I was in highschool my hair was down past my shoulders and I was a skater in a town of cliquiey lake kids, along with being poor. So I fit in about like a square peg in a round hole lol. And of course, thought school uniforms were the worst idea in the world and was glad we did not have them.

However apparently, we cannot get away from the way people treat each other and as an adult I do see some argument for it, but not totally bought into it yet. But first you have items related to gangs, which can bring violence into the schools. But how do you selectively say no to those things but not others? How do you draw a line between "inappropriate" items that some students may wear without making a subjective mess out of the rules? So the other way is just to mandate uniforms and not worry about it as it applies equally to all. I dunno, hard to say really.

I would like to think that people could get past treating others poorly due to social status, clothing choices, etc and that people could not send their 6th grade girls to school dressed up like a predator's dream, but we cannot depend on that. And in my experience in recent years, the most liberal and "inclusive" people that I know are just raging hypocrites like everyone else and still throw their judgement at some group of people. So their kids will act just the same.

Would be interesting to have actual reliable information about how kids overall mental health, grades, etc turn out in environments with school uniforms vs not. But there are so many other variables and so many absolute bunk "studies" performed these days that you cannot reliably determine that.

I do know one person who although atheist (And their entire family is) says she was thankful that she was sent to a Catholic school. She said the uniforms took a lot of the attention of who was who and the structure was very good for her learning. But others have had quite an opposite review of those schools. Again though, so many other variables school to school you cannot reliably compare their stories.

 

At my middle school the colors we wore were very restrictive to prevent people from joining gangs.

The confusing part was that the color pink wasn't allowed because it was too close to red, but the color blue WAS allowed despite also being a gang color.

I got detention once because my mom refused to let me go to school without the wrong-colored jacket she bought me despite how many times I told her about the color rule, lol.

 

Time for the parents to express dissatisfaction at the local school board meeting.

 

When I went to school I don't recall any dress standards. They were just glad we had clothes on. Me too; well at least during school hours.

 

We had some rules. Some made sense, some got into some BS. Shorts had to be long enough (no shorty shorts). They banned wearing spandex shorts with nothing else over them, which most of us guys were pretty happy about since some guys thought it was cool walking around with the outline of their junk poking out of their stupid spandex biker shorts lol. Nothing advertising alchohol or cigs or with curse words on them. Most rules were around not wearing stuff too revealing (biker shorts for guys, low cut stuff, etc).

But then in our town some rules were literally made for certain groups. I had hair down to my shoulders, and sometimes wore a bandana sort of like a dew rag on my head to keep it out of my face. Me and another guy were told that was the same as wearing a hat inside (that also was not allowed supposedly except the popular kids got away with it a lot) and that we could not do it. Then the next year, rap was all the rage and all the preppy kids who were "cowboys" the year before then started dressing like wannabe gangsters and wearing dew rags. The school changed the rule for them. So that was BS but was indicative of the cliquey little town I lived in. The rich popular kids got what they wanted, the poor kids got shit on. That is a common story.

But outside of rules that did not make sense (like the one above) and where the rules applied evenly to all, I never really saw many get bothered by them. I mean as kids we often got annoyed at the rules but most understood that it was not a great idea to have teenage girls with the bottoms of their asses hanging out of their shorts, or guys walking around showing off their junk shrink wrapped in spandex.

Later they had to ban starter jackets thanks to lowlife POS' fighting/killing one another over them. That actually started more in the malls around me since we were in a smaller town, but then the schools enacted it as well.

I did not have to worry about the "being a poor kid without the new trendy clothes" thing because I never dressed trendy and in the small town, there were plenty of other ways people knew we were poor than just what I wore. I got picked on almost daily for how I dressed and for being a skater anyways.