Is He Fighting Uniformity or Dressing Up a Lost Cause?

John Greek has thought and thought. Is he doing the right thing? Is he making too much out of it? Why isn’t everyone else as upset as he is? Is he seeing something that’s not really there?

In short, is it really such a big deal that his 6-year-old daughter has to wear a uniform to first grade?

Greek and his wife, Gail, have decided that it is a big deal, and they’re refusing to buy the standard white blouse and navy blue skirt for their daughter, who attends Wilson Elementary School in Santa Ana.

The school district, jumping on a bandwagon that is picking up speed in Orange County, is requiring that elementary students wear the standard-dress school uniforms this year, unless, like the Greeks, they sign a waiver. Uniform dress was optional last year in Santa Ana, which operates on a year-round school calendar.

Before you dismiss the Greeks as gadflies, I should tell you that both are public school teachers. John teaches chemistry and physics at La Quinta High School in Westminster and Gail teaches second-grade at another elementary school in Santa Ana. Unlike many other families in the neighborhood who have sent their children to other schools, the Greeks believe in neighborhood schools and send their daughter to Wilson. Nor are they upset with the staff at Wilson; both laud the school and Principal Devera Heard.

But John Greek just can’t get the dress-code policy out of his craw.

“I’m Anglo and my high school campus [in Bakersfield] was the scene of a race riot in 1974,” Greek said this week at home, while awaiting the start of his school year. “We went through a lot of discussion groups to try and clear up what the problems were. One of the main things we discovered was that it was respecting each other’s individuality that was important. The uniforms are exactly the opposite of that. There’s an irony that it is the opposite thing that they want to do. You want to teach students to respect each other individually, yet they’re making them look all the same.”

Officials in various districts have embraced uniforms as a way to deter gang attire and promote a more serious approach to education. In addition, they say, uniform dress reduces whatever problems may come from students’ feeling the need to buy fancy clothes to keep up with the Joneses.

If he wasn’t mad enough already about the new policy, his daughter’s first day of school two weeks ago didn’t help. With nearly all the students sporting the new white-and-blue, his daughter wore a flowered dress.

“She was all excited about the first day of school,” Greek said, “and the teacher comes up to them and the first thing she says is, ‘Oh, I like your new uniforms.’ My daughter looked at me, and I could see the hurt in her eyes. Just that right there, that we had put her in that position, made us think, ‘Oh, why not just let her wear the uniform,’ but we can’t.”

The obvious question is, why not?

“The nub of my complaint is that it doesn’t encourage individuality and takes away personal freedom,” Greek said. ‘It’s sort of chopping away at a person’s freedom. Obviously, the clothes don’t make the person. The individual is still behind the uniform, but it’s just the loss of a person’s freedom. Where are they going to draw the line?”

Greek knows the argument that we all sacrifice some personal freedoms for the greater good. He doesn’t accept that analogy when it comes to children’s clothing.

“As a teacher, here’s the problem I have with that,” he said. “What the public doesn’t understand is that the vast majority of kids are good kids. When you deal with someone who brings the rest of the group down, you deal with that individually. You don’t punish the entire class. I think they’re dealing with it [the gang problem] the wrong way. I think they should deal with them individually. I agree students should have reasonable dress, but let’s not make them look [the same].”

If I were a parent, I’d come across like John Greek. Maybe I couldn’t articulate it, but I would feel that my kids were losing some part of themselves by dressing the same way every day and dressing the same as everyone else.

Makes sense to Greek, but an odd thing happened as he made the rounds in his north Santa Ana neighborhood. “I thought I’d talk to as many parents as I could, talk to them about individuality, tell them there aren’t any consequences if their children don’t wear the uniforms, but it hasn’t been effective. They like their kids wearing uniforms.”

Latino families dominate the roster at Wilson, and Greek learned that uniforms are common in Latin American schools. “I am overwhelmed now, because it [the policy] is so popular,” he said. “It’s like a flood.”

So, John Greek finds himself fighting a lonely battle. He says he and his wife are trying to teach their daughter something but know she’s too young to understand it. In that sense, it’s more their fight than hers.

“It’s for her and for us,” he said. “It’s a matter of our personal values. We value individuality. In fact, the irony of this is that the way the cultures will get along is to respect each other’s individuality. Uniforms might be a small part of that, but I think we’re going the wrong way by putting them in.”

Are you sure you’re right? I ask.

“I think I am,” he says, then adds: “I’m pretty certain I am.”

Dana Parsons’ column appears Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Readers may reach Parsons by writing to him at The Times Orange County Edition, 1375 Sunflower Ave., Costa Mesa, CA 92626, or calling (714) 966-7821.