The Callaway Board of Education met on Monday, Aug. 11, with the agenda including two policies for second read which generated a great deal of discussion. Both of these policies were on the July meeting agenda, went back to the policy committee, and reappeared on the August agenda for approval on second reading.

The first of those is policy 504.06 - Student Dress Code and Grooming. “The state sent an updated policy that is much longer than what it was. There is a list of things that we are supposed to police in terms of our dress code that wasn’t in policy, but it was in the handbook, so I added that in just to put our policy and handbook in alignment,” explained Superintendent JD Furrow.

If the dress code policy sounds like a familiar topic of conversation, it’s because it is. The board actually adopted a policy on the subject just a year ago. “We spent lots of valuable time discussing student appearance and dress code, and here is the policy that we all approved on July 8, 2024,” said board member Rhonda Pandorf, as she held up a copy of the policy to her fellow board members. “So my question is, if the handbook doesn’t correspond with the policy, why are we not updating the handbook versus the policy that we spend so much time on?”

Board member Liana Hrupek agreed with Pandorf, citing the time that was spent last year on the policy and the fact that it meets all of the state requirements. The big thing, Pandorf stated, was the statement that “appearance disruptive to the educational program will not be tolerated”, and that the judgement of that would fall on the administration rather than individual teachers.

“We got away from nickel and diming things like short shorts and spaghetti straps, and I was a huge advocate for taking some of that verbiage out of there. Now it’s back to what we took out, because it was in the student handbook,” said Pandorf. “The handbook should have been updated to match the policy that we all voted on back in 2024.”

Board member TR Anderson shared that when the policy committee, consisting of him, Jim Phelps, and Rebecca Eggleston, went through the policy they found items that they said they did not vote on and believe had been added. The items that Anderson referred to, according to Pandorf, are in the handbook - not the policy.

“This was voted on unanimously a year ago. And now all of a sudden we are back to previous verbiage that we worked so hard to get rid of, so that we didn’t have these specifics,” said Hrupek.

Later in the meeting during board action items a vote was taken to approve the second reading of the dress code policy. Anderson, Phelps, and Eggleston voted yes, while Hrupek, Pandorf, and Mike Reiff voted no. With the vote split 3-3 the issue was tabled and will be addressed at the September meeting, set for Sept. 9 at 8 p.m.

Next week we will look at the other policy of note, cell phone usage on campus.