Posted on 04/02/2010 4:47:26 AM PDT by TornadoAlley3
Dress Deemed Too Short, Revealing On Top:
OXFORD, Ala. --
A high school senior in Alabama was suspended for wearing a prom dress that school officials said was too short at the hem and too revealing on top.
"I was so excited because it was my senior prom and I'd never been to a senior prom, so I was excited," Oxford High School student Erica DeRamus said.
DeRamus said she knew her school had dress code policies, but didn't think her dress would violate them. But when she got to prom Saturday, officials told her it was too short and too revealing.
"What cleavage? That's exactly what I said. I wasn't trying to be rude or anything, but that's what I feel," DeRamus said.
"If I felt it was too much cleavage in this dress, I wouldn't have purchased this dress," said her mother, Darrie DeRamus. "It would have stayed in that store and I wouldn't have even gotten it off the Internet and paid for it."
But principal Trey Holloday said it violated school policy stating that dresses cannot have cleavage falling below the breastbone or hems more than 6 inches above the knee.
"And so that expectation in our community is that it's there for protection of kids and not for management of kids," he said.
Erica's mother said she was never notified of the prom dress code.
But Holloday said all parents and students were told about it not once, but three times.
Of the 352 students who attended prom, 18 violated the policy, he said. Seventeen of them chose to be paddled, while DeRamus chose a three-day suspension, Holloday said.
"We're too old to be paddled," Erica DeRamus said. "This is high school. We are seniors. If you're going to act up, give us another option besides getting paddled, because this is not the 1940s. We don't take corporal punishment now."
"The thing that I would say is the difference between patience and tolerance," Holloday said. "They're young and sometimes they make young people's mistakes and we're very patient when those things are made, including this. But we're not tolerant of bad behavior or defiance."
What was this child’s mother thinking, letting her go to the prom dressed like that? When my daughter goes to prom, she will be wearing an age appropriate, not too revealing gown. It will take alot of work to find a nice one because most of the gowns they are making are “too grown”. We will be shopping in the local vintage stores.
the alternate punishment was PADDLING? that sounds just BIZARRE to me. They are high school kids not toddlers!
Isn’t this a day late?
my daughter’s high school would have made her wear one of the school sweatshirts over that dress if she chose to stay or ask her to go home and change, had she shown up wearing something like that.
In this day and age, I do not think it is bad, but in a rural GA community, thinking may be different, and that is just fine with me.
Glad to see there are still places holding good standards.
Not according to the date on the CNN report. I think it’s a late April 1 entry here. Paddling? Funny.
I just watched the video, she is a lovely young lady. The hem was not the problem, the problem was that her bust was really exposed by the her sleeveless dress. She was too big breasted to wear the dress. If I were her mother I would have said, “baby, lets find another one that covers more up”.
It was actually a very ugly dress, I mean...green seamfoam? Lovely young lady, just a bad dress.
It is short and it does show ‘cleavage’. It’s called date bait.
Paddling or suspension for dress code violation ... way overboard. Just send the kids back home until the correct their clothing and not allow them into the prom.
there is no accounting for taste i guess. i do have to say that i like the idea of prom dresses not being floor length. i was pleasantly surprised here in the DC suburbs to see that cocktail dresses are the norm for proms. back in the day i was a bridesmaid in 7 friend/family weddings and had every pastel shade of hideous floor length dress imaginable and still shudder to think of it! LOL!
Why is this kind of stuff even “news” anymore? It happens all over the country every year.
It should be in a Farmer’s Almanac predicting how many dumbasses are going to be booted out of their prom for this kind of crap.
the idea of paddling shocks me. is that even still permitted? i live in the oh-so-PC DC suburbs where i figure there would be law suits galore if someone laid a hand on a kid. And my kids all went to Catholic schools, where that was the norm back in my day.
I’ll bet her mother dress like a slut too. There is no way our daughter would have gone to anything looking like a street walker. This is another case of monkey see - monkey do.
I wonder what her father thought? Oh,wait,nevermind!
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