The first case I had like this was just a few years after Hurricane Katrina. A mother who was a homeless veteran contacted me because her son’s charter school suspended him repeatedly due to uniform violations. Fourteen and in the middle of a growth spurt, the boy’s shirt kept coming untucked. That meant that he was out of compliance with the school’s dress code, but his mother couldn’t afford to buy him bigger shirts. I was convinced then that if this woman-a well-spoken, college-educated, US veteran-could just talk to school leaders and share her story, we could convince the school to make some kind of accommodation. We got nowhere. The student’s final suspension was for selling candy in order to raise the money to buy new shirts and shoes. He ended up being expelled.
At the time it made no sense to me. Why were this young man and his mother being punished so severely for being poor? In 2012, New Orleans centralized its school expulsion process to try to limit the number of students being forced out of their schools. Yet today, the practice of keeping students from attending school because of uniform violations is common across the city. I’ve seen little kids’ coats taken from them in the winter because they’re “out of compliance,” something that could get a parent charged with child endangerment. I’ve seen students sent home for having the wrong undershirts, something that should be no business of school administrators. And I’ve seen more students than I can count be punished or told they can’t come back for one reason: because their parents are poor.
Other schools refuse to let students attend class if they’re “out of compliance.” One parent I helped worked at Walmart and lived paycheck to paycheck, struggling even to pay her rent. Her son was on free lunch, and the shoes that the school required cost $400 because he was a kid who happened to have size 15 feet. They kept him on in-school suspension for more than a month because that’s how long it took his mother to come up with the money to pay for the right shoes.
These days, I’m encountering more and more situations where parents and students are being caught up in the criminal justice system because of these “compliance” issues I’ve just described. A student can’t attend school because he or she lacks the right uniform, but once children miss a certain number of a days, the state gets involved. Parents can be summoned to Truancy Court and fined. If a summons arrives and the parent has moved-something that’s very common in a city with high poverty and a severe shortage of affordable housing -a warrant is issued for their arrest. I’ve even seen parents held in contempt of court and sentenced to jail time because their children are missing school as a result of uniform violations.
The question is ‘why?’ If a school’s student body is poor enough that 99% of the children receive free or reduced lunch, how is it OK to require parents to buy uniforms they can’t afford as a condition of school attendance? If you are a Black New Orleanian, finding work is a problem, especially work that pays any kind of decent wage.
Poor families in my city are being held to a standard they can’t afford to meet. That needs to change.
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