DHS sends boy home for dressing as a girl (rather lengthy)

[Alyssa87]

GOOD !

A school is place to learn - not to express yourself

How about learning to express yourself?

That's what your life outside school is for - a social life -- in other words, a place where my TAX DOLLARS are not being spent ... my taxes pay for school ... not dress-up

You're right, your taxes are there to (presumably) pay for the education of children.

The logical conclusion is that anytime a school goes beyond that focus on educating children, they're abusing their powers, and wasting your tax payer money. This is one of those times.

Schools that decide to act as gender role police routinely end up in the courts, where they have to duke it out with lawyers... costing you, the tax payer even more money, for a practice that has nothing to do with education. The tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars schools spend in lengthy litigation over absurdly pointless administration policies like these, could go a real long way in providing textbooks, computers, and other supplies for our children. Instead all that money gets wasted in the courts, requiring the schools to raise property taxes, further burdening our population of homeowners that have already been taxed too much to pay for our decrepit, inefficient, poorly run schools.

if they would have done that to me in highschool, i probably would have been a dropout. seriously.

[SarahG]

gender wise, there's very little difference in today's urban high schools between boys and girls fashion. why don't the adults just leave the kid alone and let him go to school?

This goes back to us having a public schooling system instead of a public education system.

Schooling by its very definition is aimed at forced assimilation aka thought police ("if its not in the text book, or it is not what the text book says... its wrong, no matter what evidence you have to the contrary").

Expression under schooling is only embraced when it involves repeating the party line... nothing is a more basic, fundamental form of expression than how people present themselves in appearance. With education, expression is irrelevant & ignored because people are there to focus on learning, not whatever the teachers think about how the students are dressed.

A schooling system would have no problem spending a sizable portion of their budget to defend their administrative policies regarding gender norms (for instance, a policy requiring guys to have short hair). An education system would realize the absurdity of such a policy, let alone the fallacy of defending it to the death in the courts. People worked hard for those tax dollars, simply throwing them away to force the male students to have short hair is intellectually dishonest, unethical, and mind numbing. Yet that's exactly what happens whenever our public schools feel the need to impose gender-regulative policies regulating hair cuts, clothing, and makeup.