While uniforms will disappear from Toano Middle School next year, just across the district another school is finding the practice to still be useful.
“We have had great success with our uniform practice,” said Marie Vallone, assistant principal at James River Elementary School. “Maybe because our students are younger and often their parents would be selecting their clothes everyday anyways.”
This past year, the Williamsburg-James City County School Board decided to maintain part of the uniform policy in the district that allows for students to opt out. At Toano Middle School, this made monitoring the uniform practices difficult as over half the students choose not to wear uniforms.
Administrators argued that it would be hard to know which students were supposed to wear uniforms and which weren’t, making the policy impossible to enforce.
RELATED STORY: After nearly 20 years, Toano Middle School does away with uniforms
But at James River Elementary School, that problem doesn’t exist.
As the last school in the district to utilize a uniform policy, Vallone said there is rarely a student that decides to opt out. In fact, she said the students particularly like the uniforms because they can match their friends.
“I don’t know about [Toano Middle School], but maybe because they’re younger they like to coordinate with their friends to all wear red one day or something like that,” she said.
Vallone said she worked at an elementary school previously to working at James River that did not have uniforms, but she couldn’t compare the difference the uniforms made between the two schools.
Instead, she said one of the things she notices the most is that the uniforms bring the students together for a sense of unity and school pride.
But not all sides of the uniform policy are beneficial. In an interview with WYDaily in September 2018, Kyung-Hee Kim, a professor of educational psychology at William & Mary, said the uniform policies in schools can make students self-conscious if the attire doesn’t work for their body or stifle them creatively.
Kim also said even though uniforms are popular nationwide, there is no conclusive evidence they help a student’s experience or education.
At the middle school level, some parents noted they didn’t think the uniforms helped create discipline or knock down socioeconomic barriers. But at an elementary school, uniforms don’t necessarily serve that purpose.
“We are an elementary school and we don’t have those types of issues and behaviors that you would in a middle school,” Vallone said. “I think for us, it creates a close-knit family knowing that kids can match with each other. When they take class pictures, you can see we are all just one together.”
Another argument at the middle schools had been the costs of the uniforms. But Vallone said she hasn’t had any parents address the school with money concerns for uniforms. If they did, Vallone said the school is fully stocked with gently worn uniforms that students can use.
And that stock has grown even more now that some Toano Middle School families are donating their old uniforms to James River. Vallone said she hopes students will continue to donate old pieces of clothing by bringing them into the school’s main office.
As the next school year starts and middle school students head to class in outfits of their choice, the uniform policy at James River maintains a strong favorability among the community, both with students and parents Vallone said.
“It’s always been a practice here since the school opened,” she said. “It’s been a great success.”
