Cobb County sixth-grader Sydney Testman was yanked out of her accelerated science class the first week of school for wearing a short-sleeved pink shirt, which didn’t fit the uniform required at Tapp Middle School, where most students are Hispanic or black.
Continued violations would bring in-school suspension, with Sydney taken out of her class, a school administrator warned her.
“It’s extremely unfair,” said Valerie Testman, Sydney’s mother. “If she were in another school in this district … her education would have been uninterrupted and she wouldn’t risk for the first time in her educational career getting an incident on her discipline record.”
Hispanic and black students in Georgia and throughout the U.S. are more often required to wear school uniforms than white students: Majority-minority schools in Georgia are about twice as likely to require uniforms as majority-white schools.
Across the metro Atlanta region, about half of black students and one of every four Hispanic students wear uniforms, while about one of every 20 white students do, The Atlanta Journal-Constitution found. That means nonwhite students are more likely to face disciplinary action that can include missing classroom lessons.
Racial disparities in school discipline have drawn federal attention, and uniform rule violations have become one more reason students can be taken out of classrooms for minor, non-violent offenses. The U.S. Department of Education and the Department of Justice warned schools last year of plans to review disparities in school discipline nationally.
“You’ve basically got a different set of rules than you do for white kids,” said Mike Tafelski of the Georgia Legal Services Program, a nonprofit law firm serving low-income clients.
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