Santa Clarita / Antelope Valley : New Lancaster High School May Require Uniforms : Education: The proposal is being considered by district officials. The campus opens next year.

A public high school slated to open here next fall may require students to wear uniforms under a proposal being debated by Antelope Valley Union School District officials.

The idea of requiring uniforms at the new campus surfaced Wednesday during a school board discussion of a new state law that allows districts to require school uniforms.

After deciding the idea had merit, the board instructed its staff to prepare a school uniform policy for a vote next month. Several board members said Lancaster High School, which is to open next September on the city’s west side, would be the best place to begin requiring uniforms.

“It’s not realistic to try to impose that on an existing school,” Billy Pricer, president of the school board, said Thursday. “If we start letting the people know at this point what our intentions are for Lancaster High, it will be an easier transition. My idea would be to run it as an experiment for about two years so you could get a feel for how it helped with academics and reduced gang activity.”

The district has about 13,000 students attending five traditional high schools and one continuation campus.

For the past four years, it has enforced a dress code that prohibits gang-related attire. Pricer and other school officials believe uniforms may be an even better idea because students would feel less pressure to keep up with the latest fashions and parents would not have to pay for trendy new clothes.

Under the new state law, a district can adopt a policy allowing individual schools to require uniforms after meeting with parents. The school must give six months notice before the policy is implemented and provide uniforms to students who cannot afford them.

District officials said there has been little opposition thus far to the uniform proposal.

One parent who has protested the idea is Michele Colborn Harris, who has two children attending district high schools.

“The quality of education is what the board should be addressing, not what the children wear to school,” Harris said Thursday. “There is a dress code on the books. It’s a reasonable dress code, but it’s not being enforced.”

Harris also said uniforms keep students from expressing a distinct identity, and they contribute to a regimented environment. “It looks like a juvenile institution or a parochial school,” she said.

Instead of debating the merits of uniforms, the school board should be trying to correct more serious problems, such as severely overcrowded classrooms, said Harris, a graduate student in political science at CSUN.

“I really think they’re manufacturing an issue that’s not going to do anything to better the situation at the high schools,” she said.