Dad Shocked At School’s ‘Shaming’ Of Daughter — But Why? What’s Wrong With This Picture?

Why did a Houston, Texas, elementary school “shame” an adorable five-year old girl last week? That’s what her dad — who also happens to be writer for the Houston Press newspaper — would like to know. He was so shocked that he wrote about the incident in the paper, though he also admitted that as soon as he knew that he was going to be the father of a girl, he expected this day to come.

Just not so soon.

“Last Monday morning was a little colder than I expected, so I made sure that there was a warm change of clothes in my daughter’s backpack in case she wanted to change. She’d had her heart set on wearing her rainbow sun dress since the weather warmed up so I finally acquiesced and let her,” Jef Rouner wrote in his Wednesday column.

“Still it wasn’t too surprising to me to see her walk out of school that afternoon with her T-shirt on over the dress and her jeans on under it,” he continued.

” ‘Did you get cold, sweetheart?’ I asked her.

” ‘No,’ she said a little crestfallen. ‘I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.’ “

That’s right. Rouner’s five-year-old daughter was forced to change her clothes, or at least cover them up with more clothes, because the spaghetti straps on her little sundress violated the school’s dress code — a code that includes no such rules for boys.

Rouner reported that he researched the wording of the dress code for the school — which he did not name in the column — and found “literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys, except that they don’t.”

He noted that mainstream clothing outlets simply do not sell that type of clothing for boys.

The dad wrote that he was particularly rankled by the fact that not only did the school force his daughter to cover “the immoral sinfulness of her bare shoulders,” officials also ordered her to cover up her legs with jeans — even though the sun dress was already long enough to cover her legs.

“This is still going in 2015. It really is. We still live in a country where someone can decide the shoulders of, and I can’t stress this enough, a five-year-old girl are so distracting that they must be sent away and decently hidden.”

The dad said he was “not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house.” But he was indeed surprised to see the school shaming a five-year-old girl.

[Image via Houston Press]