I Am Wearing My Skinny Pants To School In Mesquite Texas This Morning

Yeah, that's me in my favorite skinny pants, giving you a good look at the tattoos on my arms.

I did not know til this morning that skinny pants were a current fad amongst us youngsters.

If I wore my skinny pants to Mesquite, here in Texas, today, to go to school, I would be told to go home and change in to non-skinny pants or wear a pair of school provided slacks.

When I was in grade school, in Washington, there was a skinny pants fad. They were not called skinny pants though. Back then Levi Strauss made a blue jean out of stretchy material. If we could, we would persuade our mom's into tapering the jeans til they were really tight and difficult to get on.

I can now understand why my mom took a lot of convincing to mutilate a pair of jeans. Tapered blue jeans looked really bad. The current skinny pants don't look all that ridiculous to me.

A Mesquite middle school student, Seth Chamlee, came to Kimbrough Middle School in skinny pants and was told to take them off and put on the school's slacks. Or go home. Seth went home, where his mom, Cindy Pope, said yesterday, “He can learn more without the distraction of what to wear.” As in the boy will now be home schooled in his skinny pants.

I can understand the need to have some dress codes. For instance it seems perfectly reasonable to insist that boys not wear their jeans down around their knees, exposing their underwear. I don't know when the droopy drawers fad migrated to the South, from it's origin on the coasts, where that fad has long faded, but it might behoove local educators to somehow educate the local droopy drawer boys that that fad is as badly outdated as wearing a Gar the Texan style mullet haircut.

When I made a visit to Fort Worth, in 1998, to see if moving here was at all feasible, I was staying with a friend who had moved from Mount Vernon, Washington to Fort Worth, about a month earlier than my visit. My first day in Fort Worth I was asked to take my friend's 15 year old boy to his first day of school. I dropped him off at the school and was surprised at how, well, sluttily, for want of a better word, a lot of the girls were dressed.

So, imagine my surprise, when 15 minutes later, I get a phone call from the 15 year old boy. He was told he was not dressed appropriately for school. He was wearing what he wore to school in Mount Vernon, granted, a much more liberal, with much better schools, location. He was wearing long shorts and his skateboard shoes and a t-shirt.

He was given a piece of paper with all the instructions as to what was proper attire. I read it and could not get past how so many of the girls I'd seen at his school looked like what I later learned might be characterized as working girls on Harry Hines Boulevard

There were several comments about Mesquite's anti-skinny pants policy in this morning's Dallas Morning News.....

"If it wasn't for the name "skinny" jeans, I doubt that the MISD would have made such a fuss about these pants. I saw the kid wearing them on TV last night, and they really weren't even skin tight. Maybe if schools in Texas concentrated more on teaching our kids, instead of policing what they wear, the state wouldn't have one of the lowest academic ratings in the country."

Good point.

"I am SO GLAD that Mesquite is spending time legislating pants and their dimensions. Students are obviously perfectly proficient in all classroom subjects, so this is definitely how teachers and administrators should spend their time. Good job, folks.

Another good point.

"Rules are made for a reason......so why all the fuss about following them?"

Bad point. The above type thinking is basically fascist. Rules are not made for a reason. They are made as a guideline. And they are made to be broken. To blindly follow rules is not a lesson I would want to teach any kid. To question rules and authority, that is a lesson I would teach a kid.

To the kids in Mesquite I would suggest you all get together and all decide to wear skinny pants to school. Get sent home. Then show up the next day, again, in your skinny pants. Trust me, you will quickly be allowed to wear your skinny pants to school, and you will have taught your school administrators a valuable lesson.