High School Bans Cheerleaders From Wearing Uniforms to Class

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Jay Reilly / Getty Images

Imagine if high school cheerleaders had never sauntered around campus in short skirts, but rather walked down the hall in swishy sweatpants.

Would we be without one of the most commonly used archetypes for the popular/mean girl in greater film and television history? Can a cheerleader still be a queen bee, calling out lesser girls’ sartorial choices, when she herself is suffering from a major case of saggy-butt?

We kid, of course, but it’s worth thinking about what teenage life may have been like had these iconic skirts never invaded high school campuses. Piedmont Hills High school in San Jose, Calif. is about to find out. School administrators are extending their crackdown of the dress code policy to the cheerleading squad’s uniforms—tailored and custom-made $300 uniforms that members were told to buy by the school itself.

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Piedmont principal Traci Williams says the cheerleaders must wear sweats underneath their skirts while at school (a look deemed “dorky” by senior Sierra Burt), citing the miniskirts’ violation of the school’s mid-thigh rule for skirts and shorts. However, the skirts are fine for wear during games.  The San Jose Mercury News reports Piedmont senior, Antonia Bavilacqua, saying the ruling is “really unfair to us,” going on to say the school is making the girls feel outcasts for wearing their “school colors and spirit.”

“Cheeks are hanging out. We don’t want them bending over,” said Williams about the skirts administrators have found while conducting “dress-code sweeps” in the school. During these raids (at least that’s what it sounds like to us), inappropriately-dressed students are taken out of class and held in an office until parents bring them a change of clothes.

If only schools cracked down on education as much as they spent time cracking down on the length of a pair of Hollister shorts, eh?

Apparently the girls have reached some kind of agreement with the school, as they’ll be wearing their uniform tops with jeans in lieu of the suggested sweatpants to school on game day. “They’re OK with the policy now,” said Williams in a follow-up article on Tuesday, after a meeting with the team members.

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