By Tressa Pankovits, Co-Director of PPI’s Reinventing America’s Schools Project
On Monday, we’ll likely learn whether the U.S. Supreme Court granted a writ of certiorari(review of a lower court’s decision)during its first conference of 2023 on Jan. 6 in a public charter school case with constitutional implications. The case is a battle over school uniforms — skirts, to be precise. But don’t let the seemingly trivial subject matter fool you. Much more than a mere sartorial regulation is at stake, as demonstrated by the plethora of amicus briefs filed by conservative religious organizations urging the court to take the case.
Peltier et al. v. Charter Day School was prompted by three North Carolina parents’ distaste for Charter Day School’s (CDS) requirement that their daughters wear only skirts to school. Pants, after all, are warmer in winter. The girls also complained of feeling reticent to use playground equipment or crawl on the floor during active shooter drills and felt discouraged that they weren’t as deserving of freedom of movement as their male classmates.
After the school refused to change its policy, the parents sued for discrimination under the equal protection clause of the Constitution, Title IX and CDS’s contractual agreement with the North Carolina Board of Education, which requires charter schools to abide by all constitutional mandates.
