A school board in Nova Scotia recently banned girl from wearing short shorts. While it’s commonplace for schools to ban shorts, it’s usually a school-wide ban. In this particular case, only girls were targeted and one parent is not happy.

Canoe.ca reports that girls were recently chastised for wearing short shorts at a middle school. The reason given to the girls was that the shorts were a distraction to the male students and teachers. One of the girls’ parents, Julia Roberts-Davison, has started a petition in support of her daughter being able to wear shorts. She argues that the school’s stance isn’t about the shorts, but rather one that suggests women should change how they look for the men around them.

Because our daughters are being treated as though it is ok for men and boys to use them as sexual objects. They are being taught that they should change the way they dress but that men and boys do not have to change their way of thinking .

Even worse, Roberts-Davison claims that another female student was told to wear pants due to the “distracting” scars on her legs:

Another child in my daughter’s class, who was in the office at the same time , was told that she was not allowed to wear shorts because of scars on her legs. I should add that these scars are the result of a hard time in this child’s life. She was at a point in her life where she used to self-harm …the scars were the result of this. She was told that her scars were inappropriate for the learning environment and that other kids were distracted by them.

Alongside the petition, the school is getting slammed on Facebook by members of the community:

Defending its decision, the school says it implements the fingertip test to determine whether a student’s shorts are too short. In short, the shorts are fine if they go past the student’s finger when their hands are at rest. It also supplied the following statement:

“If a student wears an article of clothing that is not appropriate — pants that ride too low or muscle shirts, for example — then a conversation happens with the student and his/her parent or guardian. If possible, the student is asked to change into something more appropriate.”

As you can imagine, the current situation is messy for everybody. It’s understandable for the school to enforce a short shorts rule, but it should have enforced the rule as is. By bringing in the student’s sex into the matter and saying she was a distraction, it has opened a can of worms it obviously isn’t prepared to handle.

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