Sasenick, Amanda,

Esaki, Erin

Calle, Christie

History Period 6

Mrs. Godfrey

March 15, 2004

500 word process paper

            Clothes are everywhere, and, you could argue, everything.  People will pay tons of money for clothes, are always interested in who’s wearing what clothes, and love buying new clothes.  One reason is that clothes are a way to express yourself.  But school uniforms take away that power of self-expression.  Is this fair, or even constitutional?  This has always been a fascinating topic, and one that we were determined to explore. For our history day project we decided to create a website that addressed the issue of school uniforms.

            Once Christie’s mother heard that the girls would be doing a project on school uniforms, the elementary school principal began to up all the research she had on the topic – believe us, it was a lot!  We gathered more information from websites, and we came to realize that that finding resources would not be a problem.  We interviewed some people out age and also interviewed principals and teachers we knew.  We finally got to work on our website, www.geocities.com/independantstyle.  There were lots of arguments about the site, but we were eventually able to work together.  We wrote an essay about our topic and organized the interviews.  We then struggled to put them on the site.  Lastly came the process paper.

     The exploration, encounter, and exchange of our project are as follows. The exploration is, if we allow school uniforms in public and private schools, will it help improve the overall crime rate and/or success rate for the school SAT’s, etc? This is where we researched the LBUSD’s results in their experiment with uniforms in the 95-96 school year. The Long beach unified school district concluded school uniforms helped many aspects of a better school environment. The overall crime rate went down, as did a bunch of other things like grades and weapons on campus, etc. The campus seemed to be better behaved and orderly. The encounters of our project are all of the different views of people on this subject. We have interviewed students, principles, teachers, and parents, and their opinions are all different views on the overall topic. Some decided it didn’t really matter them, where as some had strong beliefs that school uniforms were or were not the answer to any problems on campus. The exchange of our project covers the fact that if you exchanged school uniforms for a better overall school environment, would it actually make the school a better place. Could dressing a student in nice clothing, the same as everyone else, help improve success rate, behavior, social skills, etc. I guess we could leave that to you to decide.