One thing that promptly hits students upon return from summer vacation is their dissatisfaction with dress codes. After two luxurious months of summer, students become accustomed to the freedom of bare arms and hats.

“I think nobody really likes at first to have rules and guidelines,” Psychology teacher Gwen Fleming said.

Student complaints range from feeling like the dress code is sexist, to simply being an inconvenience.

“Honestly, I think it’s a little bit unfair and it’s kind of prejudice towards women. You know, they have a lot more rules when it comes to the dress code than guys do. It’s honestly just really unfair,” freshman Quintin Hudson said.  

The inconvenience factor is noticed, too.

“You can go to Forever 21 and a pair of booty shorts will be five dollars, but a pair of full blown pants will be like, $45,” Hudson said.

Although it is harder to find appropriate clothes as a woman, the reasoning to have to dress a certain way makes sense…

“Starting to become aware of having dress codes is kind of an important thing in life. No matter what career you choose there’s a lot of careers that are gonna require that, and learning how to acclimate yourself to that and kind of understanding their reasons for it,” Fleming said.

The fact of having dress codes in general didn’t seem to affect anyone, only how the rules are.

“I don’t wanna say there shouldn’t be a dress code I just think it shouldn’t be as intense as it is,” junior Megan Abrams said.

Rolla dress codes seem to be more strict than some other places.

“I worked at a school previously not in this district that had more relaxed dress codes,” Fleming said.

Other students complained that the dress code is loosely enforced and unfair standards apply when some students are able to get away with certain clothing choices and others do not..

“There was this girl, in our school and y’know how they have those v-shirts where it’ll go up in the back and it’ll have some type of like lace or something? She was wearing a shirt like that but it went straight up her back and there was no lace or anything it was her open back. It was three fourths of the way, almost all the way up her back with nothing covering it up, and she didn’t get dress coded all day long. I just think the dress code is very biased towards what people are allowed to wear here because teachers will let certain students get away with wearing certain things and they will dress code other students all the time,” Abrams said

Dress codes are respected, yet misunderstood.

“I think we need to start making kids even more aware of it,” Fleming said.