LAFAYETTE, La. — The Lafayette Parish School Board met to discuss changing the school district's policy to make the coat and jacket requirements less restrictive for parents and students.
This vote comes after hearing concerns from several neighbors saying that the past policy was limiting. As well as too expensive for some families.
The previous policy that was proposed would have limited the colors of outerwear the students could wear inside the school. Students only could wear the school's colors and they would have to be hoodless.
One mother, Kate Hanks felt the policy was too hard on Lafayette families.
"I've already had to purchase multiple jackets over the last two years. We used to be able to wear jackets with hoods or sweatshirts. And then that changed to not allowed to wear hoods and so then we could wear you know, a black coat like this and then now this year we can't wear this either and it's very burdensome for our family financially and emotionally," Hanks says. "It's a lot of unnecessary stress. I think the difficulty truly was finding hoodless in those specific colors."
The Lafayette Parish School Board decided on Wednesday's night meeting, to revise the policy to allow any color jackets but still exclude hoodies due to safety concerns.
Superintendent Francis Touchet tells KATC, it's about listening to parents and focusing more on the students."
"We were able to relax the policy as far as jackets and allow jacket colors. Excluding hoods and to be able to open up the sweatshirts and colors of sweatshirts to give more flexibility to parents to really take that focus off of dress code and really make sure that we are focusing on what really matters. which is kids learning in the classrooms," Touchet says.
The new dress code policy is effective immediately.
