Reply to DCPS considering doing away with uniforms?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I think it gives the schools a bit of school spirit, and [b]as far as I know it's not really an economic burden on anyone.[/b] I think it should be a school-by-school decision. Not sure why it would have to be a policy imposed by the top. [/quote]

It's an economic burden on a fair number of people, PP. I have always felt that if DCPS is requiring students to come wearing uniforms, they should be required to pay for those uniforms, because it is a burden for families with very limited incomes.[/quote]

But every Title 1 I'm aware of has a huge supply of uniforms that it can and does give to such families. Way more awkward to take more identifiable clothing donations and clothes are an economic burden in general. Also, the disparity between clothing is real. In my kid's T1 PK4, Fridays mean pristine Boden outfits on half the class and a small set of kids in obvious hand-me-downs or still in their uniforms.[/quote]

Many schools have uniform closets that kids can get uniforms from, but it's not unlimited. The "support" that is available takes months to access. As a former school social worker, what I will tell you is that for families with multiple children in a school, the burden is pretty great. It may not be a big deal for you to drop $100 on uniforms for the year, but if you have 3 kids of 3 different sizes and need uniforms for all of them and you are also only making about $500/month, it really is a challenge. And that doesn't even touch the cost of keeping the uniforms clean enough to wear. I think that uniforms do solve the problem of your kid wearing pristine Boden and their friends wearing ratty hand-me-downs, but the reality is that most families need to purchase uniforms at the start of the school year, and many of them do not have the money to do so. [/quote]

Interesting. My kid has been at two different T1s (one barely; one really) and perhaps we've just been lucky by how supportive/available this kind of thing has been at them. In my kid's PK3 class, the teacher just asked anyone who grew out of/had no use for an old uniform to give it to her and, as a result, had a ginormous stockpile of them in the classroom. Sent home a bunch w/ some kids "just in case" they needed them. Asked at parent-teacher conferences if kids had any older siblings who could use the ones she got in bigger sizes. At our current school, there is a physical closet w/ uniforms and lost and found and parents are free to go in and grab any uniforms they need (+ any unclaimed lost and found stuff at certain times). Like my kid got soaked one day in a freak thing at school and they just had her grab one (we obviously returned it the next day)... but there's no oversight or delay in accessing the closet. We've dropped off our old uniforms there a few times and most of the stuff has been gone by the next time I've had occasion to go in there.[/quote]

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