West Deptford Dress Code Shot Down for Lack of Support

A move to a standardized dress code for has been pulled off the table, after there wasn’t enough community support for the idea, school board members announced to applause Monday night.

A phone survey of 1,717 parents earlier this month showed 45.89 percent of them were either strongly against or somewhat against the idea, while only 41.53 percent were either strongly in favor or somewhat in favor of the proposal, with a sizable chunk—12.58 percent—either neutral or ambivalent, board policy chair Peter Guzzetti said.

Those against the idea tended to be strongly against it, with 643 voicing strong opposition, the most of any one response to the poll.

“Based on the feedback from the survey, we’ve made the decision to not move forward,” he said. “We’d like to see a supermajority for adopting something of this nature, and that’s not the response that we got.”

The response rate was just under half the 3,500 total calls in the survey, which Guzzetti called somewhat disappointing, but he noted it was significantly higher than the average 26 percent for a phone poll.

The survey came after numerous meetings with PTOs and other organizations, as well as debates at school board meetings and an online feedback period, which Guzzetti said generated more than 400 responses and plenty of suggestions.

“The comments certainly came in,” he said.

And given the feedback the board got regarding a push to better enforce the current dress code, Guzzetti said the board has asked administrators to find ways to update and enforce what’s already in place, rather than replace the dress code wholesale.

“We don’t think our work is done,” he said.

School board President Christopher Strano said that despite a lack of support for the standardized dress code, he still thought the process and the conversation it generated was worthwhile.

“We tried to get the stakeholders involved—that was the key,” he said. “It was not easy having that conversation.”

The board came under fire several times since first broaching the idea in the fall, in a shift to a standardized code.

They brought up everything from to the effectiveness of moving to a standardized code.

“I can't see my child being a straight-A student by wearing khakis and a polo,” Cheryl Reeve said at a March meeting.