I am an atheist but my gawd, if a kid wants to wear a rosary (and his grandma's dying!) let him. Couldn't they just have him tuck it into his shirt, if it's such a problem?

I grew up Catholic and I know that such things can be a comfort, especially to a kid raised up in that faith who is facing imminent loss.

Julie

The whole fucking Rosary for saying Gods name in vain.

I thought he was pure Gangster.

She's never been hassled about it. It represents her belief system just as a cross does to Christians. It's mind boggling what some districts take action over.

Every once in a while some administrator or school board makes a stupid decision concerning policy, but by and large they address needs.

If a school has a dress code--say, only dark red, blue, and green shirts are allowed--and suddenly two gangs picked dark red and blue as their gang colors, with non-gang members who wore those colors suddenly under threat because of it, the school would fairly quickly change the required colors.

My wife's school has a strict dress code, what colors are allowed, what styles are allowed. Period. Violate it and get sent home.

My old school did, as well. Just a slightly different dress code, because it wasn't in the same neighborhood. My old school's dress code is oriented differently--not towards gang affiliation but towards subcultures and certain fashion trends.

If a certain crowd all started wearing a pentagram and posed a perceived threat to the crescent-moon wearers, with penters and crescers having the occasional fight in the hallways and with your daughter hit or otherwise abused by the crescers, both symbols would be banned and the few who wore it for religious reasons would suffer in order to help the many.

Nobody ever used a knife for fighting. We used fists. Then there was the Izod polo shirt and Docksiders crowd. None of them had Buck knives and I doubt they would even know how to open one - even to this day. Now kids can't even take a pair of nail clippers to school.

Somebody makes a dumb decision. It gets out. The institution has two choices: rebuke the culprit, and thereby undermine his authority, or stonewall it and see how far the outrage goes. Most of the time, after a little turmoil, the problem goes away. Occasionally, the whole thing blows up, and then the institution is left running around like a chicken with the head cut off, looking for scapegoats and valorously trying to CYA.

-- Mal

No red shirts, no blue shirts, shirt must have a collar and be a solid color, no logos, shirt tucked into pants, no jewelry (even pierced ears), no bandanas or hats, if a belt is worn, it may only be so many inches wide with not metal other than the buckle.... The dress code takes up almost three pages in the student handbook. One of her friends got sent home for wearing a belly button ring which was under her properly tucked in shirt (she must have shown it to someone at break or lunch or the campus cop caught it while using his metal detectors to scan her).