Uniformity in Style

In an office on the first floor of P.S. 116, a white brick building set amid brownstones and small stores on the East Side of Manhattan, members of the student council are preparing a survey to determine whether parents, pupils and teachers want to accept the Board of Education’s ruling requiring elementary school children to wear uniforms.

“I like to wear all different types of things and see what people think,” said Jessica Weinschenk, 10, a fifth-grader. “Wearing a uniform every day would get plain. I would want to change the way I look.”

“I think wearing uniforms is good. It would stop the competition,” countered Anita Purushothan, 11. “It would stop others from saying if you are cool or not by what you are wearing. Uniforms put everybody in the same place and nobody is cool.”

Lisa Bulgarelli, 10, hadn’t made up her mind.

“Public school is full of people from different races and different countries. Uniforms put us all together. It’s nice to be together,” she said, before shifting in the wind. “It’s also nice to be my own person. . . . Uniforms would not show our unique way.”

So the debate goes these days around the nation’s largest public school system.

But when the New York City Board of Education voted unanimously last week to require 550,000 elementary school students to wear uniforms by the fall of 1999, it was doing more than following the trend that began with the Long Beach school system in 1994.

The N.Y. decision--which allows pupils and schools to opt out of the program under certain circumstances--also fit nicely into the aggressive campaign of municipal civility being promoted by Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani.

Since his reelection in November, the mayor has used the bully pulpit of City Hall to advocate a quality-of-life agenda unprecedented in recent New York history. It includes a program of mandatory politeness by civil servants, an anti-jaywalking plan replete with pedestrian barriers on some Midtown streets, stricter enforcement of speed limits, tougher standards for licensing cab drivers, reduction of noise pollution and littering, and regulations banning reckless bicycle riders from sidewalks and roads.

“The basic principle behind quality of life is consideration and respect for the rights of our fellow citizens,” the mayor said. “That’s the foundation of any city and of any functioning society.”

Strongly underlining that theme, Giuliani proclaimed Tuesday a day of enforced civility in New York, and police fanned out with fistfuls of tickets for transgressors.

Some political observers believe quality-of-life issues could serve as the cornerstone of a campaign for higher office by Giuliani, who has declined to pledge that he will complete his second term here.

“The mayor is working on a strategy to propel himself to higher office with the theme, ‘I did the impossible. I civilized New York,’ ” said Mitchell Moss, director of the Taub Urban Research Center at New York University. “ ‘I made people wait at the corner. I made students wear uniforms’. . . .

“It’s the classic case of selling performance over personality.”

The move to school uniforms had the support not only of the mayor, but also of top education officials, including schools Chancellor Rudy Crew and school board President William C. Thompson Jr.

“Uniforms foster a sense of pride, a sense of belonging, and take the focus of attention away from clothing and back to learning,” Crew said.

“As caretakers of our school system, I believe the Board of Education must use every tool at our disposal to improve the learning, safety and performance of our schoolchildren,” Thompson said. “It would be very difficult to ignore school uniforms as one of those.”

Thompson had to modify his original proposal after the New York branch of the American Civil Liberties Union threatened court action because the plan lacked provisions for parents to excuse their children.

Under the current plan, a parent will have to submit a written request for exemption from uniforms and confer with a school official. Schools can get waivers by vote of a panel of parents, teachers and administrators.

“We have to go to local schools and to persuade them to opt out,” said Norman Siegel, executive director of the local ACLU, who spoke against uniforms at the meeting at which the vote was taken.

“We’re thinking of organizing high school students so they can be peer uniform counselors,” Siegel said. “Potentially, we would have 700 high school kids as part of the coalition and each one would adopt a school and be part of the team informing the parents and youngsters in the elementary schools what their rights are.

“The policy they adopted seems to create an environment of orthodoxy in the schools which is at odds with the prevailing way of public education in democratic society. At the heart of that system is a commitment to diversity and pluralism.”

New York officials favoring uniforms point to Long Beach’s policy, which has been praised by President Clinton for teaching young people that “what really counts is what you are and what you can become on the inside, not what you are wearing on the outside.”

In the more than three years since uniforms were adopted, crime in kindergarten through grade eight has dropped 76%, and attendance has climbed to 94.7%, the highest rate in 17 years in the Long Beach school district.

“There have been fewer fights, disruptions and suspensions,” said district spokesman Richard Van Der Laan.

In Chicago, where pupils in 441 schools out of 570 are required to wear uniforms, Cozette Buckney, chief education officer for the Chicago Public School District, said attendance has increased and gang violence has dropped.

In the Los Angeles Unified School District, the number of schools embracing uniforms has slowed since 314 signed up for them in 1995. But such dress codes still add up to big business for clothing manufacturers.

In 1997, uniforms accounted for $550 million of the $11.3 billion parents spent outfitting youngsters at the start of the school year, according to the Tactical Retail Monitor, a New York consulting firm. In 1998, the sales could soar as high as $1.5 billion as more schools adopt uniforms.

“It is definitely a national trend that public schools are switching to uniforms,” said Michael Grasee, managing director of uniforms for Land’s End, the Dodgeville, Wis., catalog clothier, which offers a range of styles to make kids look like spiffy yuppies.

Manufacturers say a uniform wardrobe costs about $100 a year.

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Times correspondent Lisa Meyer contributed to this story.

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Dressed for Success

In a recent survey, 958 elementary and middle school principals from California and nine other states were asked about the benefits of requiring students to wear uniforms. here is the percentage who said uniforms have a positive effect on:

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Principals at Principals at Schools without schools with uniforms uniforms Peer pressure 77% 76% Image in the community 65% 86% Classroom discipline 64% 80% School spirit 60% 82% Student safety 46% 75% Academic achievement 45% 52% Attendance 36% 48%

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STUDENT COMPLIANCE

Principals with mandatory uniform policies say nine of 10 students comply. But only 53% comply at schools that make uniforms voluntary.

Why students failed to wear them:

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Voluntary Mandatory policy policy Lack of parental support 40% 19% Philosophical differences 12% 23% Too expensive 6% 6% Do not like uniforms 6% 6%

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Source: National Assn. of Elementary School Principals