Before students go back to school in the fall, the administration meets during the summer to talk about important things like school procedures, rules, and the dress code. In August, students were excited to hear that the dress code included a new article of clothing: hoodies. The administration has always given athletes sports hoodies that they can wear for swimming, basketball, volleyball, and other sports. However, despite being given these athletic hoodies, students have been told they aren’t allowed to wear them in school. Students are also no longer allowed to wear sports T-shirts on game days.

These additions to the dress code left many students wondering: Why allow hoodies but only let us wear one specific type?

“So I’ve been wanting to add hoodies to the dress code for a very long time,” says Jessica Lanz, Dean of Student Affairs. “They finally got approved this year, and we were really excited, so we just wanted to give the students something to be excited about, something different.”

The administration wanted to slowly introduce hoodies into the dress code to keep things clean rather than letting students wear whatever they wanted. However, there is still a chance that students will be granted permission to wear other hoodies in the future. At least for now, students aren’t allowed to wear sports hoodies, but they are additionally no longer allowed to wear T-shirts on game day. Lanz says that the administration decided to implement this new rule because last year, too many student-athletes were wearing team T-shirts on non-game days.

“What ended up happening was that it got out of control,” says Lanz, “students were just wearing their team T-shirt whenever they wanted to, and it was just something that we felt like we couldn’t manage.”

The administration told the students that the Riviera uniform T-shirt could only be worn during P.E. classes. Many students participate in sports and receive several shirts from athletics. Similar to the rules on hoodies, only the Riviera P.E. uniform is allowed during physical education classes. The issue is that students have many shirts they can wear. Still, it is mandatory to wear the uniform shirt given.

Some rules seem unreasonable to some students right now, but they hope the administration will consider changing the dress code so they can be happy and comfortable with what they wear to school.