It appears the new administration team is starting off the 2022-2023 school year with a surprising focus: the dress code. Students are now raising many concerns about the rules, arguing the dress code should be the least of school leaders’ worries.

As of August 19, 2022, Camas High School (CHS) notified students and parents that the administration will implement the dress code throughout the upcoming school year due to the lack of proper dress enforcement during Covid years. The administration’s enforcement of more “professional attire” has been the cause of much buzz around campus and the focus of many strong opinions.

“I feel like the dress code is ridiculous. I’ve never heard a student say that they couldn’t work because they were distracted by other students’ clothes or bodies,” said senior Pyper Cruz.

Cruz’s perspective is popular amongst the Camas student body, with some students even arguing that the shift in focus brings about more of a distraction than the actual clothing choices.

“It’s more distracting when someone gets dress-coded mid-class than whatever clothes they’re wearing,” said junior Savannah Kvistad.

Camas’ new principal Kelly O’Rourke says the enforcement of a dress code is expected and normal. 

“Our main goal in all of this is to create a standard … for me, it’s not a distraction, it’s not targeting anyone; it’s just setting a standard for the school,” said O’Rourke.

Many students worry the policy targets women, particularly by disallowing crop tops and enforcing mid-thigh length shorts, dresses, and skirts.

“It’s counterintuitive. The fact that men were included in the slide show [during advisory] felt like a way to seem equal when in reality, the rules will most likely only affect women,” said junior Sophia Wade.

Principal O’Rourke said, “It’s not trying to body shame or make anyone feel bad … I would be mortified if my daughters were targeted by a dress code. When people say it’s targeted toward women, it’s politicized, which is not our aim.”

The dress code policy was updated through a staff survey, picking and choosing what clothes they deemed appropriate for an educational environment. It is not a new set of rules, rather just an update. The big change is the actual enforcement this year of the dress code.

“We as Camas staff have to come together and decided what we can ‘live with’. We went with majority rules,” said O’Rourke. “The ‘lived with’ part [of the dress code] is for the kids’ benefit. It’s there to protect our students so they aren’t knit-picked for every little thing.”

While some see this as a fair way of handling things, others comprehend it as just the opposite.

“When I saw the admin survey that said teachers were voting on what clothes they could ‘live with,’ I thought it was insane. How can 48% of our staff (admin and teachers) not ‘live with’ crop tops?” said senior Ali Hubbard.

O’Rourke explained the new dress code, crop tops and all, is actually more lenient than in other high schools. 

“Kids don’t realize we actually made it more lax than what the official dress code is,” said O’Rourke.

Staff members who support the updated code argue school is a professional environment; therefore, crop tops are unnecessary, and students should not wear them at CHS. 

But students argue rather than reforming what clothes they wear, the school should focus on making CHS a safer environment and preventing more racially motivated incidents from occurring.

“I don’t understand why this school is putting more of an emphasis on a dress code than focusing on stopping people from saying slurs,” said junior Callum Brown.

Brown is not alone in his thinking, with students feeling the CHS faculty’s time would be better spent trying to prevent the racist allegations like those last year from taking place again. 

So, outraged students are coming together to protest the change, starting an online petition against the dress code on change.org. So far, 800 people have signed the petition, saying that “teachers are more focused on clothes than education.”

One junior even went so far as to wear a black box to school over his torso on Tuesday. The box covers the areas the dress code targets, showing a quiet form of protest that grabbed a lot of attention around campus.

In the future, school leaders say they will continue to enforce the dress code alongside other standard policies like hall passes and detention. 

Dean of Students Darci Jones said the dress code has “been around, just with Covid-19, getting everyone in the building last year was our priority. We were focused on the excitement of everyone getting back to in-person learning rather than the dress code.”

So while students hope administrators and teachers do not focus too much on the dress code, it does not appear to be going away anytime soon and is just one more step toward what administrators believe is everything getting back to normal.