By Staff Reporter |
Scottsdale Unified School District (SUSD) parents are attempting to reverse the relaxation of the district’s dress code.
SUSD surveyed Scottsdale Parent Council (SPC) members about the district’s dress code, which parents criticized for failure to indicate a requirement for students to cover their midriffs.
The survey, shared by Scottsdale Unites For Educational Integrity (SUFEI), only included “genitals, buttocks, chest, and nipples” in its description of “private body parts” in a question to parents about appropriate student clothing.
SUFEI urged parents to respond to the survey in opposition to the question of appropriate student clothing and to leave a comment explaining their support for qualifying the midriff as a private body part.
Current SUSD dress code does not require students to cover their midriffs. However, the dress code does prohibit students from wearing anything deemed “hate speech,” along with any clothing depicting profanity, nudity, or pornography.
In 2022 emails reported by the Arizona Daily Independent last fall, the governing board’s then-vice president Libby Hart-Wells reportedly pressured SUSD administration to override the district’s Code of Conduct to allow girls to wear clothing that exposed the midriff.
Hart-Wells, who presided over the board last year, no longer serves on the board.
Most other districts around the Valley do not allow midriffs and have maintained the traditional set of dress codes, but several have begun to loosen their dress codes as well.
In 2023, Higley Unified School District (HUSD) removed policy language prohibiting clothes which “immodestly exposes the chest, abdomen, midriff, genital area, or buttocks,” instead reducing the prohibition to clothing exposing “undergarments [or] undergarment areas.”
Last year, Tucson Unified School District revised its policy citing concerns of sexism and equity, effectively allowing students to expose most of their breasts along with their entire torsos and buttocks.
Scottsdale parents concerned with the relaxed dress code are also coming off of other, more significant concerns with the district. Last year, the governing board approved a bonus to Superintendent Scott Menzel despite lower test scores. Menzel earned the bonus based on meeting several nonacademic achievement goals over the course of a year, not any of the academic ones: increased attendance rate, increased student extracurricular and cocurricular activity participation, increased certified staff retention, an established baseline for work-based learning opportunities and hours, and the production of a decision making matrix and proposal.
Under Menzel’s leadership for the past four years, SUSD enrollment dropped by over 1,500 students and science scores dropped 24 percent. Less than 50 percent of 8th grade SUSD students were proficient in math, despite 94 percent of students graduating.
Menzel has been a proponent of more progressive ideologies, such as those behind critical race theory and LGBTQ+ lifestyles. Menzel has defended the inclusion of sexualized discourses and subject matter on campuses as protected under Civil Rights law.
Menzel came to SUSD in July 2020 amid the racial reckoning sweeping the nation following George Floyd’s death in police custody. The year before, while still a superintendent in Michigan, Menzel gave an interview calling the white race “problematic” and meritocracy “a lie.”
“[White people] should feel really, really uncomfortable, because we perpetuate a system by ignoring the realities in front of us, and living in a mythological reality,” said Menzel. “In this country it’s about meritocracy. ‘Pull up yourself by your bootstraps, everybody has the same opportunity.’ And it’s a lie.”
The discovery of these past remarks prompted Scottsdale lawmakers to advocate for Menzel’s removal.
Arizona Superintendent of Public Instruction Tom Horne also advocated against Menzel’s contract renewal last fall.
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