Can a School Dress Code Lead to Murder?

From the Inquirer by way of the Ventura County Star. This story was also the cover story in Newsweek several weeks ago. There's no winners in this heartbreaking story.

The school district itself can be rightfully blamed for a number of lapses, but blaming the presence, or lack of enforcement of, a dress code in this tragedy completely abandons the idea of parental responsibility.

Is there anyone on the planet who thinks that a fifteen year old boy in glitter and stilettos would NOT become the object of ridicule during the slow times in algebra class? The time to make this claim about dress code enforcement was at the breakfast table on the very first day it happened. The parent who (hopefully) spewed out their coffee over the morning newspaper should have addressed the situation right there and then.

I was once fifteen, and I suspect many of you can remember that time as well. I knew "everything" back then. It's only today that I know how woefully unprepared and naive I was. That's why we're provided parents, guardians, and/or mentors: to supply that perspective.

Larger than the issue of dress code enforcement is the question of where King should have been going to school. Seen in the context of Morrisville, should he have been attending MHS, or an alternative school like DVHS? I would rather fault the school district in that context. Think about this analogy: Was King rightfully kept in the mainstream for educational reasons or wrongfully because the school board president thought special ed costs were excessive?

If my children were students in that English class, were witnesses to this tragedy, and I found out that the local Emperor of Education had insisted on keeping a potentially disruptive student in the mainstream to keep costs down, well, let's say I would break my neck to find the lawyer that I would make rich.

This opens up the concepts of special education, IEPs, and the tuitioning out of MHS students to alternative schools. Let's not hype this unnecessarily, but these are all tough and real questions that would need to be answered.

A school provides services "in loco parentis", in place of the parents in some certain situations and occurrences, most notably in the matter of locker searches and basic adult rights being applied to minors. As the Wikipedia article explicitly notes, dress code issues in schools have never made it to Washington and the Supreme Court.

I hope Larry King's family can find some measure of peace, but the responsibility for their son's unconventional closet starts, and ends, at home.

Family of gay boy slain in Calif. blames school
Posted on Fri, Aug. 15, 2008

VENTURA, Calif. - The family of a gay teenager who was fatally shot in class blames the school district for allowing their son to wear makeup and feminine clothing to school , factors the family claims led to the death.

The parents and brother of 15-year-old Larry King of Oxnard filed a personal injury claim against the Hueneme school district seeking unspecified damages for not enforcing the dress code.

King, an eighth-grader at E.O. Green Junior High School, was shot in February. Classmate Brandon McInerney pleaded not guilty to the shooting last week. He was charged as an adult and also faces a charge of a committing a hate crime.

The family's claim, filed last week in Ventura County Superior Court, said administrators and teachers failed to enforce the school's dress code when King wore feminine clothing and makeup to school.

His parents, Dawn and Gregory King, said faculty members knew their son had "unique vulnerabilities" and was subject to abuse because of his sexual orientation.

King was a ward of the court and living at a shelter for abused, neglected and emotionally troubled children at the time of the shooting.

A call for comment to district Superintendent Jerry Dannenberg was not immediately returned.

State law requires individuals to file a claim before proceeding with a lawsuit against a public agency.