Superintendent Ruth B. Turner says Montclair Public Schools will not continue enforcing its middle school dress code the way it has been enforced this fall. It’s a direct response to a controversy sparked earlier this month by an eighth grader’s petition.
In a wide-ranging interview with The Montclair Pod, Turner addressed the fallout from a Change.org petition started by Glenfield Middle School eighth grader Phoebe Chaffin, which drew more than 240 verified signatures within two weeks and a public response from Board of Education President Yvonne Bouknight. Bouknight had written that Turner was “reviewing the matter with the Glenfield administration, including the school’s dress code expectations, how those expectations were communicated, and how they were enforced.” Turner’s comments to The Pod are her most extensive public remarks on the matter to date.
“I can tell you right now that we’re not moving forward in that direction,” Turner said, referring to enforcement of the dress code as written in the current middle school handbook, which applies to both Glenfield and Buzz Aldrin.
Turner was careful to note that the policy itself is not new. “It’s the same dress code that has always existed,” she said, adding that in her view the issue was less a change in the rule than a renewed push to enforce a handbook policy that, in the past, had gone largely unenforced. She said she wasn’t aware of any directive from the district to “crack down” specifically on dress code this year, and described the increased scrutiny as part of a broader effort to enforce handbook policies generally.
But Turner also went further than the district’s prior public statements, acknowledging concerns about dress codes that predate this controversy. “I have concerns about dress codes in general, and I’ve been very vocal about that in my administrative leadership,” she said, describing her own past approach as more focused on safety, as opposed to clothing some might find distracting. She said she’s now reviewing Montclair’s policies “through a district lens” to determine whether they need to be modified or updated, and that any changes will be shared with the community once that review is complete.
That review echoes concerns Chaffin raised directly in her own comments to The Pod in a recent episode, where she said the dress code’s language, which prohibits clothing “considered by some to be lewd, offensive or insensitive” among other subjective standards, left her uncertain what she could safely wear to school. “A lot of the language used in the dress code just feels very subjective,” Chaffin said. “It never exactly classifies what’s a distraction.” District spokesperson Eshaya Draper has said the district is “aware of concerns being raised about the dress code, especially around how expectations are being communicated and applied,” and that “policies are not meant to be static.”
Turner also pushed back on some specifics that have circulated about how the policy has been enforced, saying she personally looked into claims that dress-coded students were being marked with unexcused absences or pulled out of class in a visible, embarrassing way. “That’s actually not how it’s happening,” she said, comparing the spread of some accounts to “that telephone game,” where details shift with each retelling. She said one incident during lunch in the first days of school was the closest thing she could point to, and that some accounts, including a claim that a student was forced to remove an article of clothing, were not accurate.
She was unequivocal, however, on the core objection students and parents have raised: that publicly singling out a student for their clothing amounts to a kind of objectification. “That should not ever happen,” Turner said, agreeing that research shows the burden of dress-code enforcement falls disproportionately on girls, and even more so on girls of color.
Turner did not offer a timeline for a revised policy. Families and students who want to weigh in can contact the Board of Education directly, including through its Policy Committee, or comment on Chaffin’s petition.
For Chaffin, who has said she isn’t looking to eliminate dress codes altogether, just to make them clear and consistently applied, Turner’s comments represent a meaningful, if still incomplete, answer. “I think that in dress codes, schools need to find the midpoint,” Chaffin said.
