A school insisted the girl students wear skirts. 3 girls fought the code in court — and won.
A North Carolina school required girls to wear skirts as part of their uniform. Two years ago, three female students decided to take a stand against the outdated code.
Keely Burks, 14, and the oldest of the three, created a petition asking her school to change its policy requiring the female students to wear skirts or risk punishment, which under the school’s policy could include calling parents, removing them from class and possibly expulsion. She herself had been punished for wearing shorts and was forced to “sit in the office all day” until her mother came to pick her up.
Burks explained that wearing skirts was a burden early on in her education. They kept her from sitting cross-legged like the boys, do cartwheels at recess or play soccer.
“My friends and I got more than 100 signatures on our petition, but it was taken from us by a teacher and we never got it back,” the eighth grader said in a post on the ACLU website. She continued by explaining that a few parents asked about changing the policy, but the school refused to hear them, claiming that making girls wear skirts promotes “chivalry” and “traditional values.”
The girls weren’t deterred. Instead of dropping the issue, they asked the ACLU to step in.
The human rights organization obliged, filing a lawsuit claiming the policy “violates the law and discriminates against girls.”
In their lawsuit, the group pointed out the obvious: that forcing girls to wear skirt was not only a distraction from academics, but also made it hard for them to engage in physical activity, sometimes resulting in discomfort and them being unnecessarily cold.
What gave the lawsuit weight was this is far from an isolated situation. Many girls across the United States are required to wear skirts as part of their school uniform.
However, the recent ruling on the ACLU’s case, courtesy of a North Carolina judge could change that.
“The skirts requirement causes the girls to suffer a burden the boys do not, simply because they are female,” wrote US District Judge Malcolm Harris on March 28 in response to the 2016 ACLU lawsuit against the Charter Day School in Leland.
“In the year 2016, I don’t think anyone should have a problem with young women wearing pants,” said Burks in the ACLU post. “There are so many professional women – businesswomen, doctors, and world leaders – who wear pants every day.”
Judge Harris found no merit to the school’s claims supporting the sexist uniform rules, slamming the policy in his ruling.
“The plaintiffs in this case have shown that the girls are subject to a specific clothing requirement that renders them unable to play as freely during recess, requires them to sit in an uncomfortable manner in the classroom, causes them to be overly focused on how they are sitting, distracts them from learning, and subjects them to cold temperatures on their legs and/or uncomfortable layers of leggings under their knee-length skirts in order to stay warm, especially moving outside between classrooms at the school,” he wrote. “Defendants have offered no evidence of any comparable burden on boys.”
While parents were supportive of the ruling, they were a little disturbed by the fact that getting the policy changed required an intervention by the legal system. “We're happy the court agrees," one of mothers, Bonnie Peltier, explained in a statement provided by the ACLU, "but it's disappointing that it took a court order to force the school to accept the simple fact that, in 2019, girls should have the choice to wear pants."
Hopefully this ruling will inspire other schools with similarly old-fashioned dress codes to reconsider their own policies, giving young women the same opportunities to dress as comfortably as their male counterparts. Gender equality may still have a long way to go, but giving young women the right to wear clothing on par with young men in 2019 should be a no-brainer.
A Generation Jones teenager poses in her room.Image via Wikmedia Commons
An office kitchen.via 
An angry man eating spaghetti.via 
Gif of baby being baptized
Woman gives toddler a bath Canva
An Irish woman went to the doctor for a routine eye exam. She left with bright neon green eyes.
It's not easy seeing green.
Did she get superpowers?
Going to the eye doctor can be a hassle and a pain. It's not just the routine issues and inconveniences that come along when making a doctor appointment, but sometimes the various devices being used to check your eyes' health feel invasive and uncomfortable. But at least at the end of the appointment, most of us don't look like we're turning into The Incredible Hulk. That wasn't the case for one Irish woman.
Photographer Margerita B. Wargola was just going in for a routine eye exam at the hospital but ended up leaving with her eyes a shocking, bright neon green.
At the doctor's office, the nurse practitioner was prepping Wargola for a test with a machine that Wargola had experienced before. Before the test started, Wargola presumed the nurse had dropped some saline into her eyes, as they were feeling dry. After she blinked, everything went yellow.
Wargola and the nurse initially panicked. Neither knew what was going on as Wargola suddenly had yellow vision and radioactive-looking green eyes. After the initial shock, both realized the issue: the nurse forgot to ask Wargola to remove her contact lenses before putting contrast drops in her eyes for the exam. Wargola and the nurse quickly removed the lenses from her eyes and washed them thoroughly with saline. Fortunately, Wargola's eyes were unharmed. Unfortunately, her contacts were permanently stained and she didn't bring a spare pair.
- YouTube youtube.com
Since she has poor vision, Wargola was forced to drive herself home after the eye exam wearing the neon-green contact lenses that make her look like a member of the Green Lantern Corps. She couldn't help but laugh at her predicament and recorded a video explaining it all on social media. Since then, her video has sparked a couple Reddit threads and collected a bunch of comments on Instagram:
“But the REAL question is: do you now have X-Ray vision?”
“You can just say you're a superhero.”
“I would make a few stops on the way home just to freak some people out!”
“I would have lived it up! Grab a coffee, do grocery shopping, walk around a shopping center.”
“This one would pair well with that girl who ate something with turmeric with her invisalign on and walked around Paris smiling at people with seemingly BRIGHT YELLOW TEETH.”
“I would save those for fancy special occasions! WOW!”
“Every time I'd stop I'd turn slowly and stare at the person in the car next to me.”
“Keep them. Tell people what to do. They’ll do your bidding.”
In a follow-up Instagram video, Wargola showed her followers that she was safe at home with normal eyes, showing that the damaged contact lenses were so stained that they turned the saline solution in her contacts case into a bright Gatorade yellow. She wasn't mad at the nurse and, in fact, plans on keeping the lenses to wear on St. Patrick's Day or some other special occasion.
While no harm was done and a good laugh was had, it's still best for doctors, nurses, and patients alike to double-check and ask or tell if contact lenses are being worn before each eye test. If not, there might be more than ultra-green eyes to worry about.