Adults will never understand teenagers. Teenagers will think they know more than adults.

These are absolute truths one cannot deny. Any school or organization in which there are people of different generations working in the same environment is bound to be teeming with conflict and strife. War has perpetually ensued against the music, style, values and beliefs that each age group calls their own.

Unfortunately for teenagers, adults tend to weild more power in the debate. They make and enforce the rules we must live by while attending the micro-chasm of society we call public school.We question. We rebel. We go down fighting. We sign petitions and voice our opinions to seemingly deaf ears. However, those ears only tune out the arguments they can easily refute.

“The dress code is pointless.” “These holes don’t even show skin!” “This is absolutely ridiculous.”

Those are the words the administrators, school board members and community as a whole will ignore with a chuckle when hurled at them by unhappy students. Students must try a new tactic. Logic and legalities must be used to achieve our ultimate means; a dress code upon which both adults and teenagers can compromise.

Dress code is not established to annoy and frustrate kids who spent hundreds of dollars on destroyed jeans. Adults realize that each individual is, as quoted from the Student Handbook, “unique and has the right to pursue beliefs of their choice.” Our superiors “care about [their] students; their cleanliness and neatness, and their dress, as well as their learning environment.” The dress code was established to “support these beliefs and the mission of the district, as well as to perserve an orderly, healthy, safe and secure environment which provides and emphasis on learning and which reflects the values and standards of this community.”

Essentially, it boils down to three things. Safety, a professional look as established by the community that represents the community, and a distractionless learning environment.

There are aspects of our dresscode that are absolutely justified. There are clothing and hairstyles that can be deemed rather distracting and “unproffesional”. Then, there are others that are blatantly unconstitutional due to the discrimination they generate.

The Student Handbook states that male students are not allowed to wear earrings or have long hair. How is it more distracting if a male were to have earrings and long hair than a female? Students have repeatedly professed that neither is any more or less distracting than the other. Obviously, since the matter is not one of “distraction,” it must be of the concept of “professionalism” and, according to Principal Gregg Quinn, “a representation of community values.”

Under Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972, in Section 1681 it states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Since this law mandates that the dress code policy to be fair and equal, we must question why the Tomball school district has put its personal opinion of what “professionalism” is in front of the laws of the United States.

In Texas, a school district was challenged based on this same logic. In the case Colorado Independent School District vs. Barber, male students successfully challenged the enforcement of their school’s dress code that prohibited male students from having long hair and from wearing earrings. In the court’s final decision, several problems were found within the dress code – most significantly, that the code prohibitions were discriminatory since they were based on sex.

The school district was forced to change its policy, as well as absorb the expense of legal fees to fight the challenge. When the time comes that a student challenges Tomball’s policy, how will the district respond?