Assignment #14: Uniforms

I am writing this as the word of the students of Atrisco Heritage Academy High School. We the students think we have a say in this matter, we are after all what makes this school the school that it is. For me the best in the city, no the best in the state. I am writing to express the opinion of the students to the matter of giving us uniforms at school. I am speaking to the principle and to our school board; we do not need nor want uniforms at our school. We deserve and need the freedom to dress in whatever manner we choose to.
To start this I ask you one question, why dress us the same? We are not the same. The person siting to my right is not the same as me, nor the person to my left, we all are different in almost every way possible. By doing this you will take away one of our only liberties we as students of Atrisco Heritage have. We can’t use our phones or our iPods in the only free time we get, we can’t eat except for in the cafeteria, it is almost impossible to find a sit in there. Every single one of us is a person, with feeling and opinions, we all deserve to have our freedoms even as teenagers in high school.
By giving us uniforms you are classifying us, why do this? Why classify us? For our whole life’s we are taught that we different, that nobody is the same. Since I was just a little boy even if it was from my family or a teacher I was taught and encouraged to stand out, to express my differences and become myself. Yet here at this time and year you choose to change what we have all learned through our whole life’s, you choose to put us down and classify us by evening thinking of assigning us uniforms. I and every other student say no, no to taking away our freedom, no to uniforms at this or any other high school.
You are taking from us one of the ways we express our self’s. You think we all dress the same, but we don’t. We all express our self’s in the way we dress, sure it’s not the only way we express our self’s. But it is probably the most common way of teenage expression. Even as teens we have a voice, and our clothing is one big part of this voice. It’s as if our cloths spoke and told stories of our lives, where we have been, what we have done and accomplished. By assigning us uniforms you decide to judge us for not only what we wear, but for whom we are. You judge the person we are by the way we dress, even as a teenager I know not to judge a book by its cover, because once you open it you know it is great with every page you turn.
No one, no student would or ever prefer to wear a uniform instead of their clothes. Our clothes makes us who we are, it expresses our personality. Uniforms are all the same, dull and life less; they all say the same thing, with no way of changing them to fit our personality. Everybody not just teenagers like what they wear, this is why they wear what they wear.