Students turn to ‘The Scarlet Letter’ to protest dress codes

Students at Charleston County School of the Arts in North Charleston, South Carolina, are turning their high school curriculum — The Scarlet Letter — into reality, reported mic.com.

About 100 girls and boys at the school wore scarlet letter A last Thursday as a protest against unfair and disrespectful enforcement of the school’s dress code. This brings to mind the Emma Stone film Easy A. The protest isn’t against the school’s dress code which is pretty standard (no pants worn below the waist, no exposed undergarments). It is rather against the way in which administrators are enforcing the dress code.

Reese Fischer, a junior at CCSOA, issued a call to action on her Instagram last week, “Hi! As many of you heard, there’s a new dress code policy being enforced as of tomorrow that will require students to leave class and sit in the office until their dress code violation is ‘dealt with’. Also, for a teacher to send you to the office they do not have to dictate whether or not you’re in dress code, [they just have to] simply question it. Many students find it incredibly offensive that their outfits are being held at a higher importance than their education. Many ideas have been tossed around about how to led admi know that we are dissatisfied with the way they are handling dress code violations. The solution we’ve reached is:

Tomorrow, Sept. 24, it would be awesome if we could get as many people as possible to incorporate a red ‘A’ into their outfits, as the red ‘A’ is a famous symbol for ‘sin.’ We’ll keep this page updated as frequently as possible so that the movement is cohesive and effective. Thank you for standing up for what’s fair (that everyone should be treated with equal respect).”

Peyton Corder, a junior at school, told the Post and Courier that a guidance counselor once approached her and “told her that heavier girls needed to wear longer skirts.” A sophomore, Caroline Hamrick, opened up about her experience with a teacher asking her to lift her arms to see if her top was then midriff-bearing.

“And of course you could see my midriff once I raised my arms, but I was like, ‘Still, I’m not like this all the time,'” she told the Post and Courier.

“In the summer, you see guys walking around in muscle tank tops with half their sides hanging out and their pants hanging down, and they don’t get called out for that,” Fischer told the Post and Courier.

“They don’t get called out for wearing a hat, but a girl will get called out for a short skirt in a second,” she said.

The protest has also hit Instagram and Twitter with the hashtag #NotADistractionSOA (SOA standing for the school name).

The school has reacted rather positively. The assistant principal, Robert Perrineau, called the movement “learning in action,” and acknowledged that he does see how girls have felt singled out in the policy.

“This is just a reminder of what was is already in place, that we need to be consistent and be equitable and be fair to everyone,” Perrineau told the Post and Courier. “We do want to make sure that we’re all giving that reminder and giving attention to any individual student situation in the same way. We want the point to be made, but we want to be respectful.”

While most students wore the scarlet letter just a handful of times last week, some refuse to let up until they see some real results.