North Carolina charter school cannot force girls to wear skirts, appeals court rules

Brooke Migdon
·3 min read
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Story at a glance

  • A federal appeals court Tuesday ruled that a North Carolina public charter school may not require its female students to wear skirts as part of its uniform policy.

  • The court’s majority opinion stems from an ACLU lawsuit filed in 2016 against the North Carolina Day School on behalf of three female students.

  • An attorney for the school said it was considering next steps following the ruling.

A federal appeals court has ruled that a North Carolina public charter school may not require its female students to wear skirts as part of their uniform. The decision marks the first time a federal appeals court has recognized that students of charter schools that receive public funding are guaranteed the same constitutional and civil rights protections as students attending traditional public schools, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) said Tuesday.

“Today’s decision is a victory for North Carolina’s students attending public charter schools,” Galen Sherwin, senior staff attorney with the ACLU Women’s Rights Project, said in a statement. “As the opinion recognizes, dress codes that enforce different rules based on students’ sex reinforce old-fashioned conventions of how girls should dress, and signal that girls are not equal to boys. These discriminatory gender stereotypes are harmful and have no place in our public schools.”

The court’s ruling stems from an ACLU lawsuit filed in 2016 against the North Carolina Day School, a public charter school in Brunswick County, N.C., on behalf of three female students. The case challenged a long-standing school policy requiring girls to wear skirts or skorts to school and prohibiting them from wearing pants or shorts.

The students, who at the time of the lawsuit’s filing were in kindergarten, fourth and eighth grades, argued that the skirts they were made to wear restricted their movement, prevented them from sitting comfortably in class and playing freely at recess and caused them to feel uncomfortably cold in the winter.

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The school’s uniform policy, the lawsuit argued, “on its face, treats girls differently than boys and causes them to suffer a burden that boys do not suffer.”

The North Carolina Day School had said its uniform policy was designed to promote “traditional values.”

A federal judge in 2019 had ruled that the school’s uniform policy was unconstitutional because it discriminated on the basis of sex. The school later appealed.

“Nothing in the Equal Protection Clause prevents public schools from teaching universal values of respect and kindness,” Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Barbara Keenan wrote Tuesday in her opinion. “But those values are never advanced by the discriminatory treatment of girls in a public school. Here, the skirts requirement blatantly perpetuates harmful gender stereotypes as part of the public education provided to North Carolina’s young residents.”

The school’s attorney, Aaron Streett, in a statement Tuesday said Charter Day School disagrees with the court’s majority opinion and is considering next steps, the Associated Press reported.

“The majority opinion contradicts Supreme Court precedent on state action, splits with every other circuit to consider the issue, and limits the ability of parents to choose the best education for their children,” he said.

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