Uniform Discussion Draws Small Crowd at Manchester High

If parents and students don't want uniforms at Manchester High School next year - or want uniforms - you really wouldn't be able to tell by the crowd that showed up at a public forum Tuesday evening to discuss the possibility of implementing a uniform policy at the school next year. 

Excluding teachers and administrators, only about 30 parents and students attended the meeting, held in the auditorium of Manchester High School. 

The meeting was overseen by Manchester High School Interim Principal Gregory Ziogas, although Interim Superintendent Richard Kisiel stepped in at several junctures from the audience to answer questions or correct details of the proposal. Ziogas said he was not an advocate of uniforms, having spent 40 years as an administrator in the Plainville school system without them, but was merely doing as he was instructed by the Board of Education to explore the possibility of implementing a uniform policy at Manchester High. 

"I am not an advocate for uniforms," Ziogas said, noting that he would not be principal of the high school in September should the policy go into effect. "I am the messenger. I am doing what someone has told me to do." 

Ziogas said Tuesday's comments would factor into the report he would give to the Board of Education about the implementation of uniforms at Manchester High. Only three school board members - Neal Leon, Kelly Luxenberg and Chairman Chris Pattacini, who arrived late - attended Tuesday's public forum. 

Although it was a small turnout, almost all who spoke Tuesday expressed opposition to the idea of uniforms at Manchester High, citing everything from difficulty enforcing the policy to the concept that it would be punishing the majority of kids who were well-behaved and already adhere to the school's current dress code to compensate for a small minority that did not. 

"It's not going to solve anything," said Dylan Cherko, a sophomore at Manchester High School. "What are you going to do to enforce it? And if we already have a dress code, why can't you just enforce that?" 

Carla Landon, a single-mother of four students in the Manchester Public Schools system, said that when it affected her financially because she had to spend four times as much on new clothes for the one child who attends Illing as she planned to spent on her other three children for new school clothes this year because she had to buy all new clothes. 

"There's many other reasons I'm not for it," Landon said. "But finances is the big one." 

But Jack Crockwell, a special education teacher at Illing who also has four children in the Manchester school system, was one of the few to speak out in favor of the idea of uniforms Tuesday, because he said it took the emphasis off fashion and enforcing the dress code in his classrooms and placed it back on learning. 

"You pay me a lot of money to teach, not to write referrals. And we're teaching a lot more now, because we don't have to fight those big fights," Crockwell said. "Do you want us teaching or do you want us dealing with dress code violations?" 

Before the discussion, Ziogas said that of 1,914 people who responded to a survey asking if they "supported" the concept of uniforms at Manchester High, 36 percent "strongly agreed," 10 percent "agreed," eight percent said they were "neutral," 10 percent "disagreed" and 38 percent "strongly disagreed." 

Kisiel said the Board of Education would receive a recommendation from him and Ziogas at some point in the next several weeks about the concept, but that those in attendance Tuesday had certainly made their point in speaking out against the proposal. 

"I think we heard that loud and clear tonight," he said. 

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