Middle School To Tweens: Wear Green If You're Single
IOWA, LA — M.J. Mouton’s daughter is 12. She’s in middle school. What was this, the Louisiana dad wondered after learning his daughter and her classmates, some of them as young as 10, were asked to reveal their “relationship status” in the color of their dress during a homecoming spirit week theme day. The tween’s choices were red if she’s taken and green if she’s single and — can you believe this? — yellow “if it is complicated.”
How complicated can relationships be among the students at Iowa Middle School, he wondered. Again, his daughter is 12. She’s not even thinking about relationships, he said, but she does think sorting out of kids based on whether they’re holding hands at lunch is bound to make some kids feel left out and excluded.
“Totally inappropriate,” Mouton tweeted. “Welcome to Louisiana.”
Other color-coded theme days weren’t as eyebrow raising and included “stoplight day,” when kids wore red, yellow and green shirts, and a boys versus girls gender day, when the boys were expected to wear pink and the girls blue.
The tradition appears to have spilled over from the high school in Iowa, a town of about 3,300 in Calcasieu Parish in southwest Louisiana. That’s not OK, Mouton, who writes science books for kids, told Yahoo Lifestyle.
“Maybe it’s appropriate for high school, but for middle schoolers, it’s not,” he said. “[My daughter] doesn’t really have interest in those things. She also sees that there’s going to be some kids who potentially are going to feel bad [about not dating], or kids who are going to participate because they want to feel a part of something.”
In a tweet, he said “relationship day” helps high school kids figure out who might be available for a date for homecoming.
By tweeting about the dress code, Mouton said his hope was “that parents of the kids at the school see that this is not a good idea and have their kids not participate.”
“They do have that option, but it does not take away from the fact that the admin. did not see this as problematic,” he wrote.
In an email, he wrote to the school district: “Are you promoting relationships for kids in middle school? Are you setting up boys and especially girls to be targets? Do you understand that if a single kid speaks up about this being wrong, which many do [feel], they fear repercussions from students as well as teachers?”
His tweet elicited a strong response on Twitter. The school district also heard him.
“Our intentions were not to cause undue stress on students or their families,” read the letter, which Mouton posted on Twitter in a screenshot. “Unfortunately, we did not hear about them until so late in the week that we were unable to change our days. I can assure you that we have plans in the works for next year to avoid a repeat of these circumstances.”
Once the criticism was known, the school district could have sent out an email alert telling kids they could dress however they wanted on Monday, which had been declared “relationship day.”
On Twitter, many praised Mouton and said kids are pushed toward relationships at too young an age.
“Something that never really comes up in these discussions is the way we allow the popular media to bathe our kids in sexual stereotypes from birth,” one person noted.
To that, Mouton tweeted: “We fought against that for years. ‘Boys’ toys = puzzles, critical thinking, engineering. ‘Girls’ toys = be pretty, take care of the baby. My girls didn’t know the difference … it was just toys.”
Kids should just be allowed to be kids, he said.
“Sure, some middle school kids are going to have boyfriends and girlfriends and crushes, but I don’t think we need the school to play matchmaker for a 10 to 14-year-old,” Mouton told local news station KPLC.
In the end, only about half of the students at his daughter’s middle school actually dressed according to Monday’s theme, he told Yahoo.
He’s glad he spoke out.
“If nobody said anything, they would just let this go on for years and years,” he said.
Photo via Shutterstock
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