Upon arriving to collect his little girl from class, Jef Rouner was astounded to discover school officials had insisted his daughter wear a T-shirt over her dress and a pair of jeans beneath as they asserted the design of the dress, which featured spaghetti straps, violated the school's dress code.
In an almost resigned manner, Jef took to his blog to air his views on the matter and admits that he isn't surprised his daughter has been subjected to what he considers dress coding shaming.
Considering the incident, Jef wrote: "I'm not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house. I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, 'It's a girl.' I didn't think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old."
Jef's main grievance is that the school's dress code seems gender specific, asserting: "There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don't. They don't sell boys clothes that do that."
Commenting on the design of his daughter's dress which exposes her shoulders, Jef justified his choice of attire, saying: "It's a dress from a mall chain store in her size. She's worn it to church, and in the growing heat she was looking forward to wearing it a lot because it's light and comfortable."
Focussing on the implication the incident may have on his little girl, Jeff finished up by saying: "Now I have this child, the one that argues scientific points about everything from the top speed of land animals in Africa to the classification of the planets with me endlessly, wordlessly accepting that a dress with spaghetti straps, something sold in every Walmart in America right now, is somehow bad."
This isn't the first story we've reported on which highlights the troubling issue of gender inequality when it comes to dress codes in schools, and unfortunately it's unlikely to be the last.
