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Express [read "pierce"] yourself

Your bling is not you.

The Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals issued an unpublished decision yesterday concerning a Brevard County "School Board written policy that prohibits the wearing of non-otic pierced jewelry by students in the Brevard County public school system." What's that, you ask? It is the county's school dress code which says:

Pierced jewelry shall be limited to the ear. Dog collars, tongue rings, wallet chains, large hair picks, chains that connect one part of the body to another, or other jewelry/accessories that pose a safety concern for the student or others shall be prohibited.

The student, who was a 16-year old 10th grade student at Viera High School when the case began, "has piercings located on her tongue, nasal septum, lip, navel and chest." She sued the school board alleging that her First Amendment right to free speech was violated by "prohibiting her from wearing jewelry in her non-otic body piercings at school." Specifically, she asserted that her piercings "were an expression of her individuality, a way of expressing her non-conformity and wild side, an expression of her openness to new ideas and her readiness to take on challenges in life." But, as the court noted, she "stated expressly that her non-compliant piercings were intended to make no religious or political statement."

That observation decided the appeal. From there the Eleventh Circuit applied Tinker v. Des Moines Indep. Comty. Sch. Dist., 393 U.S. 503 (1969) to what it deemed a "content-neutral regulation of conduct that expresses no political message." Other Circuit Courts have held (here & here) that similar conduct was entitled to First Amendment protection. Here, though, when the court went ahead and assumed the conduct was protected, the dress code regulation survived the challenge (under intermediate scrutiny).

Dress-code/free-speech challenges are all about balancing. It's about bucking the system. Uniformity, anarchy and everything in between. As the not-late-great Andy Rooney once observed,

It's a funny thing about uniforms. Sometimes you find them in unexpected places. If the word 'uniform' means the same, then often young rebels fighting the system are so persistently unconventional and non-conformist that their uniform of rebellion is as identifiable as the hotel doorman's. That was certainly true of the hippies in the 1960s. They all dressed alike.

(Source). It's debatable whether uniforms improve grade-school behavior or academic performance. Some say yes, some say no. I'm unqualified to answer, although I did attend a private, preparatory school for a couple of years, i.e., junior high school. (Those were my unruly years!) I can't help but think that administrators and courts alike place too much faith in the "orderliness" that uniforms bring to youth. Maybe this is because, as any kid will tell you, uniforms affect adult behavior more than they do child behavior.

Full post as published by Meeting the Sin Laws on August 16, 2008 (boomark / email).