Maybe schools should simply ban words on clothing

The flap, with of course the accompanying lawsuit, over the "Be Happy, Not Gay" T-shirt at Neuqua Valley High School is enough to make one want to say, "Just make them all wear uniforms."

No, we don't mean that seriously, but it is a tempting thought.

After all, neatly dressed students in identical, and tasteful, attire works well for parochial schools.

And it would mean that no one would be wearing a T-shirt that said anything on it at all, so there would be nothing for other students and/or teachers to get upset about and no reason for a school district to end up in court because an administrator decided to ban a shirt.

But with the situation as it is - a dress code that pretty much lets kids wear anything they want as long as what the clothes "say" doesn't consist of negative or demeaning speech or constitute fighting words, it means that school administrators must decide when clothing crosses the line and then possibly have to defend that in a court of law.

So when the U.S. Court of Appeals decided that the words "Be Happy, Not Gay" were too weak to be characterized as negative or derogatory and unlikely to provoke incidents or "poison the educational atmosphere," according to 7th Circuit Judge Richard Posner, it then told the district it couldn't ban kids from wearing the shirt - at least while the civil rights lawsuit over the garment's words was still in court.

We would note that the U.S. Court of Appeals ruling, as written by Posner, stated that "children are in school to be taught by adults rather than to practice attacking each other with wounding words, and school authorities have a protective relationship and responsibility to all the students."

However, a policy that leaves the words on a shirt open to who is doing the judging is a recipe for having kids, and their acquiescent parents, push the envelope.

This potential problem is sometimes solved in the business world by including in the office dress code the banning of any words at all on clothing.

Maybe the district needs to consider this.

That way every judgment call made on specific verbiage presumably wouldn't be open to a lawsuit because there would not have to be such calls.

Heaven knows District 204 has more than enough lawsuits already.