As the last school in the district with a uniform dress code, Reuben Elementary, too, has scrapped its policy after a parent survey about the clothing rules this school year.

New school principal Mike Stroud began the year planning a per-day dress code for the Silverstreet-area elementary school where students wear a certain color shirt depending on the weekday.

The clothing assignment promotes a team atmosphere and worked well when Stroud’s children attended Reuben, said Stroud.

But after some resistance, Stroud had parents fill out a survey to find a dress code happy-medium.

Parents were OK with the different colors students had to wear, but didn’t like the per-day color assignments, Stroud found.

So the school made it a “voluntary policy,” said Stroud, adding that the dress code was never meant to be punitive.

“You can still participate,” he said.

And Stroud doesn’t want to rule out the possibility of reinstating the per-day dress code. He plans to poll parents again in the spring about the issue.

He wants to listen to the voice of the parents, he said, and still wants “to promote that sense of oneness and being all together,” that comes with a per-day dress code.

HISTORY

The School District of Newberry County never had a district-wide uniform policy, but some years ago, former Newberry Middle School Principal Donivan Edwards sought out a uniform plan to help students focus on learning and not clothing.

Edwards and his staff investigated research on school uniforms, polled parents and teachers, set a plan and notified local clothing stores about what students would need.

Newberry Middle School implemented the uniform dress code about eight years ago, said Edwards.

For his two children, Edwards said he was able to buy all their back-to-school clothes for under $100.

The uniform included white, sky blue and navy shirts—polos for boys and blouses for girls—and khaki or navy bottoms and tennis shoes.

“It was very simple,” said Edwards.

Elementary schools that feed into Newberry Middle School—Gallman, Reuben, Newberry and Boundary—also adopted uniforms.

DRESS DISCUSSION

“It equalized students in terms of their attire,” says Cynthia Downs, superintendent of instruction. “Many parents reported that they favored the policy because it was less expensive to dress their children, and that they had fewer arguments about what the children would wear before school in the morning.”

Downs says that after more than 25 years in education, she’s seen uniforms improve a school’s climate and support good discipline, positive relationships and student achievement.

“Students are not distracted by or concerned about what others are wearing, or what they themselves are wearing, or are not wearing,” she says.

But after surveying parents to see if they liked the dress code, Newberry Elementary School, which feeds into Newberry Middle School, eliminated its uniform look at the end of the last school year.

Most parents were in favor of eliminating the dress code, reports Reggie Wicker, parenting coordinator and administrative assistant for the school.

And the transition to a no-dress-code school this year has been very smooth, says Wicker.

Plus, the administration wanted to focus more on academics, which the school is able to do now “rather than the constant reminding of dress code rules to students and parents,” Wicker said.

Gallman and Boundary elementary schools also did away with uniform policies, only keeping the dress code a few years.

“It wasn’t long at all that we did it,” says Amber Tarver, Boundary Elementary attendance secretary.

Tarver, who has worked at the school for nine years as secretary, remembers the two views of parents then.

Some parents reported liking uniforms: “They didn’t have to argue with the students about what to wear,” she said parents would say.

Others, though, called it a “hardship,” she remembers, because some didn’t know far enough in advance to buy the specific colors and types of clothing.

Former Reuben student Brittany Hawkins, 11, says she’s glad to be at a school without uniforms.

The sixth grader’s first year at Newberry Middle means no uniforms after dress-coded years at Reuben Elementary.

Buying the uniforms was a hassle, Hawkins says, because she couldn’t find the light blue and navy polo shirts in Newberry. Her family bought them at a store in Columbia.

“I didn’t like them because it was a struggle to find them. Certain things we had to have we couldn’t find them around here,” she says.

Still, while knowing both sides of the uniform debate, Tarver herself liked the tidy, one-accord look of Boundary students in dress code.

“It just really looked neat with all the students walking down the hall in the uniform,” Tarver says.