High School Dress Code Rules See 170 Students Sent Home, Sparks 'Near-Riot' (VIDEO)
Duncanville High School's dress code was fully enforced Wednesday resulting in 170 students being sent home and a number of students receiving in-school suspensions. The Texas high school students were so upset by the disciplinary policy that they got out of control, resulting in a "near-riot" and a food fight.
The Duncanville High School dress code requires that all students have belts with their pants, no shirts with any graphics or logos and no denim, among other stipulations. However, the students say the dress code is almost never enforced and that the timing— many students were attending review classes for finals when they were kicked out— couldn't have been worse.
"The teacher just calls me and tell me to lift my shirt up and I didn't have a belt on," junior Edward Ramirez, who has a 3.5 GPA and told KDFW he had never been written up, explained. "So [no] belt and ID and got kicked out."
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"The staff told me that my shirt was out of dress code despite the fact that it is a school spirit shirt," he added.
By 11:30 a.m. many students were upset at the dress code crackdown, so they started a food fight in the lunchroom that quickly spread out to the hallways of Duncanville High. Eventually even trashcans, tables and other debris flew through the air as the unruly students refused to listen to teachers in what was described as a "near-riot."
"There was water and food everywhere," Nigel Armstrong told The Dallas Morning News.
Administrators called police to regain order, but no arrests were reported.
The school's principal Andre Smith insists that they enforce the dress code "every day," but admitted that students missing school was not a good thing.
"No day is a good day to send students home. We want students in the classroom … We want to teach them that they must meet the expectations not only here in school, but outside of school as well," he said.
"They're enforcing the rules and they're supposed to do that. But for them to not do that all year?" senior Arturo Moreno responded to WFAA ABC 8. "It's the last two weeks of school and now they want to enforce it?"
Duncanville High School has an enrollment of over 3,700 students.
