No pajama pants allowed while learning from home, says Illinois District

Students in the Illinois capital are not allowed to wear hats, bandannas, sunglasses, pajama pants or slippers in school buildings. And that dress code is now expanding to her bedrooms and kitchen tables.

“We do not need students in pajamas and all that other stuff while they are at their Zoom conferences,” Jason Wind, the district’s director of student support, explained during an online board meeting of Springfield Public Schools this week.

Along with the dress code, the district’s distance learning guidelines require students to “get out of bed, preferably at a desk or table.”

A district spokesman, Bree Hankins, said in a statement that the distance learning guidelines were enforced with teachers, administrators and parents, and that the dress code reflected what students would wear when they were in school.

The district, which has about 14,000 students, does not expect to be punishable by distance learning, Ms. Hankins said.

“Our hope is that distance students approach learning as they would in a classroom, to the extent possible considering the individual circumstances of each student,” Ms Hankins said. “However, we understand that the interpretation of the dress code in a distance learning environment will differ from a normal school setting.”

Other prohibited items, according to the district handbook, include clothing that is extremely baggy or that displays offensive language as symbols, and shoes that have wheels at the bottom. “Every school has a reasonable interpretation of the dress code depending on the culture and climate of the building,” the handbook says.

Due to the coronavirus pandemic, the district will begin the school year on August 31 with a hybrid program, with students attending two lessons in person two days a week. During the three days they are at home, the rules will still apply, the district said.

Christy Schmidt, who has two children attending school in Springfield, Ill., Said she saw some of her Zoom calls last semester, and that there was no correlation between what students wore and whether they had attention.

“How much trouble will you give the parent with four children, work a full time job and try to support their children, and attend their children at the Zoom meeting, but he was in pajamas?” said Mrs. Schmidt, who has a support group for parents during the pandemic.

Mrs. Schmidt’s 14-year-old son, Ian, was tight-lipped in his thoughts about the extended dress code: “It sounds stupid.”

Many school districts nationwide have resorted to distance education in some capacity to try to slow the spread of the virus, but home learning poses its own challenges. Students who were already disadvantaged have fallen further behind, especially those without home computers or reliable internet access.

Judith Ann Johnson, a member of the school board, said the rules of distance learning were in place to ensure that students maintain high academic standards, not to police every garment or where they have their Zoom talks.

“Everyone does not have a mansion with a room designated as an office,” she said. “It is absolutely fine if a child has an office or if a child sits comfortably on his bed while they study. For me, that’s fine, as long as they’re sitting up. ”

Ian’s younger sister, Keyra, 10, was skeptical the neighborhood could maintain an online dress code. She also said she wanted teachers to allow students to work out of their bedrooms, especially if a shared residential area could be too noisy to pay attention to their lessons.

“When we have nieces and they make noise everywhere, it’s the only place we can actually be in our bedroom,” she said.

It remains to be seen how strictly the district will control what Springfield students wear when they study at home. But extra clothing will be required during the time they spend physically in a classroom, the handbook says, “Masks like grids that are solid colors, printed with District # 189 or school logos are preferred.”