Beweare promgoers: Watch your front

Ah, prom season. Most people can’t help but get all nostalgic thinking about gowns, limo rides, dancing and.... cleavage?!

For a group of students at L.W. Higgins High School in Jefferson Parish, all they’ll remember about that fateful night is that they might not have put their best chests forward on Saturday.

A teacher denied admission to about 50 girls who she thought were wearing overly revealing gowns. Twenty-five of the girls altered their dresses and were let in; the other half missed out on a once-in-a-lifetime experience.

Luckily, with age one learns that prom means very little in the grand scheme of things. It’s just a shame the affected students don’t realize this yet. If they did, it’d be a lot easier for them to get over how annoying some teachers can be.

Some of the parents are actually threatening to sue the public school system over the issue. They’d be wasting their time. In case after court case, a school system’s authority to govern appropriate dress trumps the judgment of parents.

Furthermore, Jefferson Parish’s student dress code prohibits clothing that exposes the student’s back, chest or midriff. That sounds vague to me, but school officials did say they publicized the rule in classrooms before the event.

They publicized it so well, in fact, that at least one student brought in a picture of her dress to an administrator and was given the OK. And, you guessed it, that same student was denied entrance into the prom.

According to the student dress code posted online for Tangipahoa Parish Schools, the written policy does not include a section on special event attire. If the regular daytime school uniform policy were to be followed, dresses themselves wouldn’t even be allowed. Should the school board have a separate special occasion school function dress code?

So it begs the question: Exactly what is appropriate to wear to prom these days? From the television news reports I saw, none of the Higgins girls were wearing anything out of the ordinary. Yes, some of the dresses were low-cut or strapless. But nowadays, that’s pretty much all the department stores sell at prom time. From the hype generated, I was sure I was going to see some kind of see-through stripperwear.

What constitutes a non-bared chest? Are we talking turtleneck, scoop neck, v-neck? It’s all very confusing. And maybe the most confusing of all is why a principal or other administrator wasn’t involved in the decision-making.

Jefferson Parish School officials now say the best bet is to bring the dress to school and model it for an administrator beforehand. If I had to go through all that, I’d be more happy doing my own thing on prom night.

The prom is just one night among 12 long years of uniform-wearing and dress code-abiding. To nitpick about necklines seems a little absurd.

Meanwhile, the parents of the Higgins girls are lobbying for at least one fair goal – the reimbursement of their children’s $100-a-couple prom tickets.