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Fans attending Central Dauphin High School home games won't see scenes like this any more, and that's not a bad thing. The school has a new rule requiring students to keep their shirts on at games. No more boys with bare chests or girls in sports bras, looking like they just emerged from a mud-wrestling contest.
Students are free to show their school spirit by slathering their arms and legs with paint, and they can use their shirts as a canvas for creative expression, but they can’t wear masks or cover all of their faces in paint.
Naturally, the new rule has prompted grumbling from some students.
That’s to be expected. An important part of adolescence is to question adult authority and test limits. Just as important for an adolescent’s development is for adults to enforce reasonable limits.
Otherwise, kids get the message that anything goes. And, because kids are kids, sooner or later, anything would go.
To be effective and enforceable, the rules shouldn’t be totally arbitrary. (“Because I said so” isn’t going to work well with adolescents.) As kids mature, they need more freedom to make some of their own decisions, within safe and appropriate bounds.
But as any parent who has endured a child’s teen years knows, adolescents aren’t the world’s best decision-makers. Their brains have not yet developed enough to see the world through others’ eyes and understand the impact their notoriously self-centered behavior can have on others.
With all that in mind, mid-state schools have good reason to tighten up a bit on displays of school spirit.
The Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association started the ball rolling with a "keep-your-shirt-on" rule for district and state championship basketball games. The rule helps discourage the liberal use of body paint that can cause a big mess in school bathrooms and gyms. The rule helps send a signal that there will be limits to the kind of boisterous rooting behavior that's acceptable in the crowd.
Letting students parade around school grounds in bare-chests and sports bras also pushes the boundaries of taste, especially when raging hormones are already clouding adolescents’ judgments. School is not the beach – there’s no need to be showing major skin. Just as restaurants say “no shirt, no shoes, no service,” there are legitimate reasons to apply different clothing rules in different settings.
PIAA has not yet extended the new rule to other sports besides basketball, but that’s a reasonable next step, since the same general rationale applies.
School rules against students wearing masks make sense, too. In this case, there’s a legitimate security concern. A student wearing a mask may feel emboldened to act out in the stands, knowing it will be harder to be identified.
But a ban on full face paint seems unnecessarily strict. A student who covers his or her face in school colors is hardly well-disguised. Peers still know who the student is.
If security is such a huge concern for face-painted students, take a photo of each holding their school ID on the way in, for future reference. That check-in process might encourage them to behave better, because if they get too rowdy, they know they can be identified.
As the rules on what high school fans can do in the stands get tighter, students may chafe at the restrictions. But once they head off to college or to the adult world, they'll have more freedom to go crazy with the body decorations at sporting events.