A charter school in North Carolina has been ordered by a federal judge to stop enforcing its rule that forced female students to wear skirts.
According to the Associated Press, Charter Day School, based in Leland, N.C., was ordered by U.S. District Judge Malcolm Howard last week to abandon the traditional dress code rule that could punish violations with suspensions or even expulsions.
The school was sued in 2016 over the rule by the legal guardians of three female attendees who argued that girls had to behave differently than boys due to the skirts, forcing them to avoid activities like sports in fear of “exposing their undergarments and being reprimanded by teachers or teased by boys,” according to Howard’s summary of the plaintiffs’ arguments. The female students were also supposedly distracted from studying because they would be forced to be cognizant of the “positioning of their legs during class.”
Howard concluded the rule violated constitutional protections for equal treatment and the skirts-only rule treated female students differently than male students.
Charter schools are funded by public money, but have more autonomy than regular public schools.
“All I wanted was for my daughter and every other girl at school to have the option to wear pants so she could play outside, sit comfortably, and stay warm in the winter,” Bonnie Peltier, who is a mother of a student in the case, said through the ACLU. “We’re happy the court agrees, but it’s disappointing that it took a court order to force the school to accept the simple fact that, in 2019, girls should have the choice to wear pants.”
No student had been expelled for any such violations at the school which opened in 2000.
