Last June, the school board approved a “uniform” dress code for all 12,000 of the county’s public school students, grades K-12. Wilson County, Tennessee is a case in point. Anti-uniform protest movements are active in numerous school districts throughout the country, as school boards and school administrators impose rigid uniform policies, in some instances over the objection of many of the parents. Today, mandatory school uniforms have become a lightning rod for students and, in many cases, their parents. In its Tinker decision, the Supreme Court declared that “state-sponsored schools may not be enclaves of totalitarianism.” But three decades later, students are still subjected to repressive measures and their basic liberties are frequently trampled by school administrators and politicians. Mary Beth Tinker and her mother, Lorena Tinkerīut battles for civil liberties never stay won. In Tinker, the Court ruled that students do not “shed their constitutional rights to freedom of speech or expression at the schoolhouse gate.” Represented by the ACLU, the students and their families embarked on a four-year court battle that culminated in the landmark Supreme Court decision: Tinker v. In December 1965, Mary Beth Tinker, John Tinker and Chris Eckhardt, three teenagers from Des Moines, Iowa, were suspended for going to school wearing black arm bands to protest the war in Vietnam.
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