On the second day of school, Phoebe Chaffin watched classmates at Glenfield Middle School get disciplined for what they were wearing.
She went home angry.
Later, while lying in bed, her phone lit up with something unrelated: a request to sign a Change.org petition. She clicked on it. Then she had an idea.
“What if I started a petition to actually do something about what I was angry about for once,” Chaffin recalled, “and to try to help change the Glenfield dress code?”
Less than two weeks later, the petition started by the eighth grader has drawn more than 240 verified signatures, prompted a response from the president of the Montclair Board of Education and helped push the district’s middle school dress code into public debate.
While Chaffin’s petition grew out of what she saw at Glenfield, the dress code itself is not unique to that school. It is part of Montclair Public Schools’ middle school handbook and also applies to students at Buzz Aldrin Middle School. The updated handbook was distributed shortly before the school year for students to review and sign.
Now Montclair Public Schools says it is taking a closer look at the policy and how it is being implemented. And the district has already acknowledged what may be at the heart of the disagreement: not simply what students are allowed to wear, but how those expectations are “communicated and applied.”
What Started the Glenfield Middle School Dress Code Petition
For Chaffin, simply putting her name on the petition felt like a risk.
“I was very scared about getting in trouble if I put my name on it,” she said. “But I decided to put my name on it anyways because I realized that if I want to make real change, I need to not just try to stand back.”
The first person she told was her mother.
“She told me that I really didn’t have to and that it was okay if I decided not to,” Chaffin said, “but she said that either way she would support me with what choice I’d made.”
Her classmates soon began reaching out, including some students Chaffin said she had barely spoken to before. They left comments on the petition and passed it around on Snapchat, Instagram and group chats.
“They’ve been very supportive,” Chaffin said. “They’ve reached out, expressed their happiness there’s a petition, a cause to get behind about the dress code.”
Then the response moved beyond her own school.
Montclair Board of Education President Yvonne Bouknight responded through Change.org, saying the board takes seriously concerns involving “student dignity, privacy, equitable treatment, and a safe and supportive learning environment.”
“Superintendent Turner is reviewing the matter with the Glenfield administration, including the school’s dress code expectations, how those expectations were communicated, and how they were enforced,” Bouknight wrote. The superintendent is Ruth B. Turner, who has led Montclair Public Schools since July 2025.
Chaffin said seeing the board president respond “felt very good.”
What Montclair’s Middle School Dress Code Actually Says
The policy at the center of the dispute is Montclair’s middle school dress code, not a rule written solely for Glenfield.
The updated handbook, distributed to students at the start of the school year, lays out expectations that include clothing coverage, undergarments and attire that administrators deem inappropriate for school.
It also leaves considerable discretion with school officials.
“Because no dress code can be all-inclusive,” it says, “the administration reserves the right to make the final decision on all attire.”
The policy requires “sufficient coverage, thigh length, for both front and back areas,” prohibits clothing that could be “considered by some to be lewd, offensive or insensitive,” and says that instructional time missed because of a dress-code violation is unexcused.
For Chaffin, that discretion is exactly the problem.
“A lot of the language used in the dress code just feels very subjective,” she said. “It never exactly classifies what’s a distraction.”
She compared it to the way two families might make different judgments about whether a PG-13 movie is appropriate for their children.
“So if I choose out an outfit and my parents see it and they think that’s okay, I could come to school and the administration is like, no, that’s not okay, that’s not appropriate,” she said. “I feel split, because when I read the dress code it makes me wonder what’s okay to wear, what’s not okay to wear.”
That uncertainty has made something as routine as getting dressed for school more complicated, she said. Chaffin now considers what her friends have worn without getting dress-coded and what is least likely to result in her losing class time.
“If I’m confused on what to wear and I’m not gonna get excused for my outfit not being appropriate,” she said, “then I just feel stressed.”
She also described enforcement that can be conspicuous.
A student might be stopped in a hallway by a teacher, staff member or administrator and told to adjust a shirt or put on a hoodie. Sometimes, Chaffin said, those conversations happen privately. Other times, nearby students can hear them. In some cases, she said, a classroom phone rings and a student is called to the office during a lesson.
The Montclair Pod asked the district directly about those concerns.
Eshaya Draper, executive director of strategic communications and community engagement for Montclair Public Schools, said the district is “aware of concerns being raised about the dress code, especially around how expectations are being communicated and applied.”
“Any conversation with a student about attire should be handled respectfully and in a way that does not leave a student feeling singled out or embarrassed,” Draper said.
The district emphasized that the dress code is not new. But Draper also suggested that longevity alone is not a reason to leave a policy untouched.
“Policies are not meant to be static,” she said, “and when students or families tell us that something is unclear or not working as intended, that should help shape the conversation about what may need to change.”
The district said students and families can share concerns with administrators or the Board of Education, including comments intended for the board’s Policy Committee. The committee’s public meetings provide another opportunity for community input.
Montclair Has Had This Conversation Before
This is not Montclair’s first debate over what students should be allowed to wear to school, or how adults should enforce those rules.
In May 2015, Montclair High School student Emma Wescott filed a petition after students objected to the high school dress code and its enforcement, arguing that girls were disproportionately targeted.
The petition drew more than 1,300 supporters. Roughly 100 students also staged a peaceful demonstration outside the high school before classes one morning, carrying signs and protesting what they described as a sexist dress code. The protest ended when the school bell rang, and classes were not disrupted.
School officials subsequently discussed changing some of the language and the way the rules were enforced.
More than a decade later, some of the arguments sound familiar: Who decides what counts as distracting? When does a standard become a value judgment? And can a rule technically apply to everyone equally while having a very different effect depending on a student’s gender or body type?
Do Montclair Parents Agree on the Dress Code?
The quick answer is no.
The Pod asked on Instagram whether Montclair’s middle school dress code is too vague.
The responses suggested that many parents can agree on one thing: schools are entitled to set some boundaries. Where those boundaries should fall, and how they should be enforced, is another matter entirely.
Danielle Neff, who runs the Montclair Moms Dads and Parents Facebook group and has a middle schooler and a high schooler, does not object to the idea of a dress code. She objects to the wording.
“Half the problem is that the language they use incorporates value judgements,” she wrote, calling it subjective and warning that it “will be unfairly used against girls, especially curvy ones.”
Her proposed alternative was considerably more straightforward: “If we could all agree that butts should be fully covered by clothing, even when bending over or seated, that would be sufficient.”
Other commenters focused on who is most likely to feel the consequences of enforcement.
One wrote that dress codes “universally affect and punish girls over boys.” Another argued that body type can influence how the same article of clothing is perceived: a shirt may draw scrutiny on a student with a larger chest that it would not on someone else; the same shorts may fit two bodies very differently.
Not every parent agreed that the policy was the problem.
“The enforcement of the dress code is not too vague, and it was very much needed,” one mother of a middle schooler wrote. “Things were getting out of hand. I don’t know how many times my mouth drops to the floor in shock over some of the outfits I’ve seen.”
At least one commenter proposed eliminating all the guesswork: require school uniforms.
“No need to overthink what one was wearing during the week,” she wrote. “More time to focus on school and less on what everyone owns and wears around you.”
A recent Montclair Local letter to the editor argues that the dress code should be rescinded outright, rather than merely clarified.
The writer, whose daughter attends Glenfield, pointed to a 2022 U.S. Government Accountability Office study that examined dress codes in a nationally representative sample of 236 public school districts.
GAO estimated that 73 percent of dress codes cited student safety and security as a goal. But the agency also found that dress codes more frequently restrict clothing typically associated with girls and reported concerns from researchers and education groups that some rules can unfairly burden girls or contribute to environments in which girls feel less safe.
What Phoebe Chaffin Is Actually Asking For
It would be easy to reduce this argument to two sides: students who do not want adults policing their clothes and adults who think teenagers need limits.
Chaffin’s position is more complicated than that.
She is not asking for a school without a dress code.
“I think that in dress codes, schools need to find the midpoint,” she said.
She believes some limits make sense. Students should not come to school in bikinis, she said. Shorts should cover their backsides. Clothing containing hateful words or symbols should not be permitted.
But to Chaffin, those examples also illuminate what a dress code ought to be trying to prevent.
“I think you should be allowed to express yourself how you want,” she said, “but there’s certain clothing that has something like a curse word, or something that could be offensive to groups, like a hateful symbol, a hateful word, and I don’t think you should be allowed to wear something like that, because I think that is actually what will distract classrooms rather than a bra strap.”
She sees a difference between clothing that interferes with another student’s ability to feel safe in a classroom and clothing that simply reveals part of a student’s body.
A tank top, she said, should be allowed. So should visible bra straps.
And therein lies the larger question now facing the district. Not simply whether a middle school should have standards for what students wear. Most of the people weighing in seem to believe it should.
The harder question is what those standards are meant to accomplish, whether a 12- or 13-year-old can reasonably understand them before leaving the house in the morning, and how a child should be treated when an adult decides the line has been crossed.
Chaffin does not claim to have solved the question of where every hemline should fall or how much of a midriff is too much for middle school. Her argument is more fundamental: Tell students clearly where the line is. Treat them respectfully when questions arise. And when they say a rule is confusing or humiliating in practice, listen.
That conversation is now happening beyond Glenfield. The district says it is reviewing the middle school dress code and how it is being implemented, a policy that applies to students at both Glenfield and Buzz Aldrin.
For Chaffin, that alone represents a meaningful shift. What began with her lying in bed, angry about what she had witnessed at school, has become a districtwide conversation about who writes the rules, how they are enforced and whether students should have a voice in shaping them.
Her answer to that last question seems clear.
“I think that in dress codes, schools need to find the midpoint,” she said.
Now Montclair has to decide where that midpoint is.
Those who want to weigh in can sign Chaffin’s petition on Change.org, contact the Montclair Board of Education or share input with the Board’s Policy Committee.
