Too sexy: Mother, principal scrap over eight-grader’s skirt
Incident highlights debate on district’s new code of conduct

BY SCOTT JENKINS
SALISBURY POST

CHINA GROVE — Gabriele McClure sees nothing wrong with the long black skirt her daughter wore on the last day of school Tuesday.

School officials did, and Angela McClure had to sit out China Grove Middle School’s graduation ceremony for eighth-graders.

Don Bost, principal at China Grove Middle School, says he objected to the length of slits in the skirt and he gave the girl and her mother the option of changing or closing the slits with pins.

The incident underscores the wrangling over student conduct that happens every school day and comes as the student Code of Conduct is under review for the 2000-2001 school year.

This week, the Rowan-Salisbury Board of Education gave initial approval to changes in the code, including revisions to the policy on proper dress at school.

A list of banned clothing doesn’t include skirts with long slits, and school officials have not proposed adding that item.

Gabriele McClure said she had no problem with her daughter wearing one.

The skirt’s slits are “pretty high but you couldn’t see anything ... all you could see was the legs”she said. “I’ve seen other girls where the skirt is the same way, where you could see more than my daughter’s skirt.”

Besides, she said, her daughter doesn’t normally wear skirts. The school required girls to wear skirts for Tuesday’s ceremony, when eighth-graders got certificates.

So she couldn’t understand when her daughter called around 7:30 a.m. Tuesday, just after arriving at school by bus, to tell her she should come and pick her up.

When she got there just after 8 a.m. — about an hour before the ceremony — McClure said she found her daughter in the guidance office, “sitting on the couch … just bawling.”

The eighth-grader was very upset after the incident, McClure said, but has since begun to feel better. A friend delivered her certificate and report card.

McClure says school administrators didn’t tell her daughter to change clothes, they just told her to call her mother and go home.

But Bost, the principal, says that’s not true. He says he gave Angela the option of changing clothes. Two male students who wore shorts to school — pants were required for boys — opted to change and participate in the ceremony, he said Wednesday.

“I told the student outside that she’d have to find something else or she’d have to pin it up,” he said. “I’ve never seen a dress like that at school. It was really inappropriate for school.”

The slits, he said, came “up to her underwear, mid hip,” and she was wearing a bare-midriff top, which policy bans.

That policy also says a principal may “make the final decision regarding appropriate dress.” And that’s what Bost did Tuesday.

“We can’t cover everything that could be worn to school,” he said. “So we do have the flexibility to deem something inappropriate that causes a distraction, and this dress certainly did cause a distraction.”