Girls at North Carolina school don't have to wear skirts, judge rules

So the girls, then ages 5, 10 and 14, decided to do something about it.

What began with a school petition by one of the students seeking to allow girls to wear pants to school stretched into a yearslong battle that culminated last week when a federal judge struck down the school’s uniform policy as unconstitutional.

“The skirts requirement causes the girls to suffer a burden the boys do not, simply because they are female,” Judge Malcolm Howard wrote in the ruling, filed Thursday.

The ruling landed amid a larger discussion about how female students of all ages are viewed, after recent episodes at other schools.

Students at the University of Notre Dame wore leggings last week to protest a letter to the editor in the student newspaper that urged female students not to wear the form-fitting pants because they invite men to look at their bodies. And an article in The Washington Post about a Maryland high school, where girls fought back against a list ranking female students by their attractiveness, inspired a reflection on how similar lists have proliferated in schools for years.

For the girls at Charter Day School, a tuition-free charter school of 900 students in Leland, North Carolina, near Wilmington, the issue was equality. Girls were required to wear skirts, jumpers or skorts, which look like a skirt but include shorts-like fabric underneath. Boys, on the other hand, were required to wear pants or shorts.

Keely Burks, one of the students involved, was in eighth grade when the American Civil Liberties Union filed the suit on behalf of the girls and their guardians in 2016.

In a blog post at the time, she described how “distracting and uncomfortable” it was to have to pay attention to the position of her legs while sitting in class. She recalled when, in first grade, she and other girls were told by a teacher that they could not sit “crisscross applesauce” like the boys, but instead had to sit on the floor with their legs curled to the side.

She said in the post that she and her friends started a petition that garnered more than 100 signatures before it was confiscated by a teacher.

“Personally, I hate wearing skirts,” Keely wrote. “Even with tights and leggings, skirts are cold to wear in the winter, and they’re not as comfortable as shorts in the summer.”

If it were up to her, she wrote, she would wear pants or shorts every day to school. While some of her peers may still want to wear skirts, she said, “we should have a choice.”

The policy prohibiting girls from wearing pants or shorts was part of Charter Day School’s overall approach emphasizing “traditional values” in education, the judge summarized in his ruling. The school’s handbook said the dress code was in place to “instill discipline,” “promote a sense of pride and of team spirit” and reflect the standards of parents who choose to send their children to the school.

The school, which opened in 2000, aimed to foster a culture that preserved “chivalry and respect” among students, Baker Mitchell, founder of the company that oversees Charter Day and other schools in southeastern North Carolina, wrote in an email to a parent about the uniform policy in 2015.

“The uniform policy seeks to establish an environment in which our young men and women treat one another with mutual respect,” he wrote, according to the email exchange, which was included in court documents.

But Howard wrote that the school showed “no connection” between the goal of upholding traditional values or instilling discipline, and the requirement that girls wear skirts, which he determined imposed an unequal burden on female students.

In a statement Sunday, Mitchell emphasized the school’s academic rigor and said its students were “top achievers” in Brunswick County, North Carolina. “The Charter Day School Board is analyzing the opinion and will be meeting with counsel in the very near future to discuss their options moving forward,” he said.

Bonnie Peltier, mother of one of the students, said in a statement she was pleased with the legal victory, though it won’t have an immediate effect on her daughter, who was in kindergarten at the time of the lawsuit but is no longer a student at the school.

“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,” Peltier said.

“We’re happy the court agrees,” she said, “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.”