A high school in Florida will refund the cost of its yearbooks after a member of staff digitally altered images of dozens of female students to hide their chests and shoulders.
The decision by Bartram Trail high school to censor 80 photographs, many with crude digital editing, angered parents and students. Some accused administrators of “making girls feel ashamed of their bodies”.
No changes were made to portraits of male students, people who saw the yearbook said. Photographs of the boys’ swim team attired in only bathing suits were unaltered.
“There’s a black box over my chest and the cardigan on the side is like moved over and it looks really awkward and I was very confused,” Riley O’Keefe, a ninth-grader, told Jacksonville’s News4Jax after receiving her copy of the $100 yearbook last week.
“They need to recognize that it’s making girls feel ashamed of their bodies,” she told the New York Times.
The published images showed clumsy attempts to cover up girls’ skin. In some photographs, square blocks of garments the girls were wearing were copied and pasted haphazardly to cover shoulders or chests.
DRESS CODE DEBACLE | “She thought she was doing the right thing and trying to be helpful and I think ultimately, though, it was a mistake.” - @SJCSD board chair Patrick Canan on the decision to alter female student yearbook photos. #News4Jax @wjxt
— Joe McLean (@JoeMcLeanNews) May 24, 2021
MORE: https://t.co/S13paqcv16 pic.twitter.com/mUhBsdyaxQ
The results led to some students being teased, parents said.
“The school did a horrible job of protecting our children’s mental health by body-shaming,” Adrian Bartlett, the parent of a 15-year-old, told the Times. “It’s making our kids feel like they should cover up their bodies, they should be ashamed of them, and it was humiliating for many of them.”
Administrators at the 2,500-student school referred inquiries to the St Johns county school district. A spokesperson told the Guardian the superintendent, Tim Forson, would issue a statement later on Monday.
In a comment to the St Augustine Record, Christina Langston, the district chief of community relations, said the editing was done by a female teacher who concluded that the photographs violated the district dress code that “clothing that is immodest, revealing, or distracting in character is unacceptable”.
“Bartram Trail high school’s previous procedure was to not include student pictures in the yearbook that they deemed in violation of the student code of conduct, so the digital alterations were a solution to make sure all students were included in the yearbook,” Langston said.
She said any student or parent unhappy at the decision would receive a refund.
O’Keefe’s parents said they planned to join others at a school board meeting on Tuesday to call for an update to the “outdated” dress code. They said their daughter had collected about 5,000 signatures seeking the change, a petition sparked by a crackdown in March in which 31 female students were disciplined.
In that incident, students claimed that one member of staff told a girl she “looked like a hooker” for wearing a skirt deemed too short, and that another student was ordered by a male teacher to unzip her top, revealing only a sports bra underneath.
