You are walking home from practice on a cold November night. Shivering, you make your way home, shower, and open your “My Homework” app only to find you have about 4 hours of homework. After finishing your assignments, you remember the test and project you have, and the work assigned by the clubs you were encouraged to join. After finally finishing, you realize it’s about 1am. Exhausted, you set your alarm for 7am, giving yourself about 6 hours to sleep. The next day you wake up tired and stressed from the night you had, so you throw on a pair of sweatpants and a sweatshirt. You get to school, ready to study and finalize your project. You barely make it to your first class before you have someone dress code you for wearing sweatpants.

As students of a college prep school, we are constantly being prepared for college workload and expectations. We are given high standards that we will have to maintain at a college campus, but how many colleges care about what you wear to class daily? Shouldn’t faculty be worried about students upholding their grades, rather than the dress code? Students should be comfortable in their learning environment, and have their main priority be on education, not worried about whether or not they will get a detention for that morning’s pants. The faculty’s focus on how students wearing sweatpants will make the school look bad prove that this part of the dress code is not about education but about reputation.  

When talking to students, most claimed that the dress code feels like another thing to stress about. One student says, “ I feel like it’s just one more thing we like have to worry about. We are already so stressed from school work and sports, it’s like now we have to worry about wearing sweat pants. It would be a different story if modesty was in question, but really all this for sweatpants?”. Bringing up modesty adds an interesting perspective. Dress codes are typically placed to help make sure students are dressed appropriately to avoid distractions. So how are sweatpants immodest? Students should feel comfortable, focus on education, and work on bettering their overall character at school, so will wearing sweatpants take away from those 3 major goals?