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Monday, January 28, 2019

TN: Legislator Says Bring On Fashion Police

Tennessee state representative Antonio Parkinson (D) considered all the issues facing education and decided that the one he wants to address is-- parent dress codes.

Schools may be figuring out-- slowly-- that body-shaming students and chasing them down for ripped knees might be counterproductive. But this Memphis lawmaker wants to crack down on the parents:

"People wearing next to nothing. People wearing shirts or tattoos with expletives. People coming onto a school campus and cursing the principal or the teacher out. These things happen regularly," Parkinson told TODAY Style.

“A principal I talked to told me a lady came into the office with her sleepwear on with some of her body parts hanging out. You got children coming down the hall in a line and they can possibly see this,” he said.

Parkinson does know how to dress
The bill does not lay out specifics, but lets each district set its own standards. Parkinson is apparently still "working on" the bill, so the details are not yet available.

I'm hoping that the bill allows for actual honest-to-God fashion police. Chris's mama shows up to drop off her child in nothing but pajama's-- have the school's fashion officer arrest her or fine her or throw a giant burlap sack over her. Will it matter if she stays in the car? How much of his naughty tattoo must dad cover up. Seriously-- how does anyone enforce a law like this. Any teacher who has to enforce a dress code knows all the stupid problems that come with it-- do I whip out my ruler and measure those shoulder straps? do male teachers admit they've been examining student cleavage to make sure there's not too much boobage showing? and there is nothing like a fingertip length rule to make you aware of how widely relative arm lengths vary from teen to teen. So who is going to deal with all this baloney when dress coding grown-ups? And why do I suspect that this will be mostly about policing women?

Yes, it would be nice if folks dressed appropriately and respectfully when they came to school, but that doesn't mean we need to pass a law. I hate it when people use quotation marks incorrectly, but I don't want offenders arrested by actual grammar and punctuation police.

Given Tennessee's educational system, it seems as if there are better things to spend time on.


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