A mother and daughter are giving interviews to anybody who will listen about behavior that actually should be very embarrassing to them if they had any sense of shame. Here are the facts that the family really wants you to know.
* 15-year-old Miranda Larkin was the new girl in school who didn’t know the dress code, which specified that skirts be no more than three inches above the knee.
* Mother Dianna Larkin allowed her daughter to go to school in a skirt “closer to four inches” above the knee.
* Busted for a dress code violation, Miranda Larkin was made to wear a “shame suit” of sweat pants and a large T-Shirt that read “Dress Code Violation.”
* Crying ensued.
* The Larkins are now threatening to sue the school, alleging FERPA violations, and saying ridiculous things like “[T]his is not about punishing kids. This is about humiliation.”
Dude, your daughter is in high school. The only punishment she understands is humiliation…
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Of course, this happened in Florida. I’m going to skip over the part where three inches above the knee is totally cool for high school students. Just imagine a lot of grumbling about the kids these days and how they impact my lawn. At the end of the day, this isn’t about the violation, it’s about the punishment. Here’s how the Washington Post reports it:
On her third day at a new school, Miranda Larkin had to go to class in red sweatpants and a hideous, oversized neon yellow T-shirt with “DRESS CODE VIOLATION” emblazoned across the chest and down the leg – an ensemble no high-school kid would voluntarily be caught dead in.
Here’s how Miranda Larkin reacted to it:
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“She put on the outfit in the bathroom and looked at herself in the mirror and just broke down. She started sobbing and broke out in hives,” her mother, Dianna Larkin, told USA Today.
Sobbing and hives? Hives? HAD THE SHIRT BEEN ROLLED IN SMALL POX? If you are a person who is so concerned with your superficial appearance that you have a nervous freaking breakdown if you wear sweatpants, you have far bigger issues to deal with. And if you are so concerned with being “singled out” because of what you are wearing… maybe you should dress more conservatively in the first place?
In any event, like the actual Scarlet Letter, the person being forced to wear it shouldn’t be nearly as ashamed as the person who contributed to the problem. In this case, that would be mother Larkin.
“She’s a good kid,” Miranda’s mother told ABC. “She actually has a perfect disciplinary record. I’m not a rescue mom. I really do believe in punishing my kids if they do something wrong, but this is not about punishing kids. This is about humiliation.”
The teen’s mom is so upset about the way her daughter was treated that she plans to file a complaint under the Family Educational Rights and Privacy Act, which says student records, including disciplinary actions, cannot be released without permission.
“I feel that by putting a kid in an outfit that says what they did wrong across their chest and down their leg is taking their private records and making them public and that’s a clear violation of their privacy rights” she told USA Today.
I generally hate lawsuits that devolve to “I feel this should be illegal.” All discipline in high school is public in some way. Sorry, let me rephrase: We hope to GOD that all discipline in high school is public. Please do not let random high school administrators take kids away into some room for “private” punishment.
Under Dianna Larkin’s ludicrous FERPA interpretation, telling a kid in class “you’re getting detention” would be a FERPA violation. Hell, having detention would be a violation because everybody would know which kids weren’t around to play after school. The school board sees the problem with the Larkin rule. From the ABA Journal:
The school board’s lawyer disagreed with Dianna Larkin’s interpretation of the law. “I have given this consideration, looked at FERPA and have even asked other opinions in other districts,” the lawyer said in a statement published by First Coast News. “None of us see this as a FERPA violation as it is not a personally identifiable student record. Additionally it is not displaying a discipline record to the public. If we put the kid on work detail all students would know that he/she is being disciplined. … Saturday school, same result. Community service, same result. If we took off the words the other students would still know that the prison orange T-shirts were for dress code violations. I think that the practice is OK.”
You know why this story is getting so much traction (it’s in the Washington Post, ABC, USA Today)? It’s because the mother called it a “shame suit” and “shaming” has been incorrectly associated with “bullying” which we’re now concerned with because we’re supposed to have sympathy for fragile individuals who sob and break out in hives at the slightest provocation. Crying is now evidence of persecution instead of an indication that a person can’t control their emotions.
Instead of blemishing her permanent record with a suspension over something as stupid as an inch on a skirt, or giving her a literal slap on the wrist like they roll in Catholic schools, Larking received a brief public shaming. Nobody but Larkin would have remembered it, and she would have remembered it every time she got dressed in the morning, which was the entire point. In response, Larkin’s mom wants everybody who can Google to know that her daughter wears short skirts, committed a dress code violation, and is the kind of person who cries in the bathroom when things don’t go her way. AND SHE DOES THIS IN THE NAME OF PRIVACY.
No, Larkin is not a “rescue mom.” She’s a “put out the fire with gasoline” mom.
New kid at school forced to wear ‘shame suit’ for dress code violation [Washington Post]
School forces teen to wear shaming T-shirt; mom sees violation of discipline-record law [ABA Journal]