With more and more students opting out of wearing uniforms, GUSD
dumps the unpopular policy
Gilroy – The class pictures tell the story well.
In the late-1990s Las Animas Elementary School students, all decked out in navy blue bottoms and white polo shirts, smiled at the camera. But every year fewer students wore the matching outfits in Carmen Kotto’s class.
In last year’s picture, maybe one or two children are wearing the simple uniform.
But Kotto’s class is an exception to the rule. About 10 of her second and third graders don uniforms on a regular basis, the educator is a firm believer in uniforms, and students who show up in the blue and white clothes receive play money.
In most classrooms across town, the Gilroy Unified School District’s 11-year-old uniform policy is a joke. Children run around in all types and colors of clothes, few in anything revealing a uniform.
That’s why board President Pat Midtgaard said she and Trustee Rhoda Bress decided to dump the outdated and unenforced rule when the two began reviewing and rewriting board policies last year.
“We sat there and looked at each other and said we don’t even have uniforms anymore,” Midtgaard said.
Midtgaard said she remembers when the policy was implemented back in 1995. She was working at Rucker Elementary School at the time.
“It was one of those things that the longer it went on the less effective it was,” she said.
The problem was the district had to allow parents to opt out of the uniform requirement according to California Education Code. Once parents started submitting waivers a few years in, the policy went by the wayside.
“It became a big problem monitoring who had waivers and who didn’t,” District Superintendent Edwin Diaz said.
Diaz said the policy was brought about for a variety of reasons, including the concern of gang related apparel and the division between the haves and the have-nots.
“There was a lot of thinking that school uniforms had an impact on student behavior,” he said. “I really haven’t seen anything that would indicate to me one way or the other that it had such a dramatic positive effect that would require me to think that every student should be in uniform.”
Still, Diaz does think that uniforms reduce the whole name brand scene that turns campus into a competitive palace of couture rather than an educational institute. And when some kids show up in trendy threads, others in hand-me-downs, some argue it further highlights economic division.
“That’s one of the rationales for having uniforms is that it kind of equalizes the playing field,” Diaz said. “I think that’s one of the positive things that parents like about uniforms, that it reduces the whole focus on having the latest style to wear to school.”
That’s one of the reasons Kotto pays her students to wear uniforms. Also her students are better behaved when they’re all wearing uniforms and its easier for parents when all they have to buy is navy blue bottoms and white polo shirts.
Kotto would like to see a uniform policy enforced, making the whole waiver process a more painful process so fewer would opt out.
“They should just come to school ready to learn not caring about what they wear,” she said.
