It’s really about freedom of expression and tolerating individuality, which are core values of our society.

The Right to Wear Tigger.  It certainly sounds silly when you say it that way, but the ACLU attorney quoted (and at S.F. Gate) above got it right.  Hopefully paying $95,000 in attorneys fees will help some bureaucrats learn that lesson as well. I’ve never understood how squelching expression in the young was supposed to teach them to responsibly express themselves as adults, but then again I’m not an education bureaucrat. 

For coming to class at a Napa middle school wearing hosiery that portrayed the Winnie the Pooh character — in violation of the school’s solid-colors-only, no-pictures, no-logos dress code — the seventh-grader landed in the principal’s office, and then in a detention program called Students With Attitude Problems.

Now Redwood Middle School and the Napa Valley Unified School District, which approved the code, have landed in court.

The school’s “unconstitutionally vague, overbroad and restrictive uniform dress code policy” flouts state law, violates freedom of expression, and wastes teachers’ and students’ time and attention that would be better spent on education, the American Civil Liberties Union said in a suit filed Monday on behalf of six students and their parents.

Actually, the banning of Tigger-wear is probably among the least offensive results of their dress code, despite local affection at Howling Point for Tigger and other tigers.  According to the S.F. Gate article, one student was cited for wearing a shirt with the words “Jesus Freak” and another for wearing a pink Breast Cancer Awareness Ribbon.   Even if you accept that schools should be teaching appropriate expression by banning poor choices (like gang colors), there’s no way that banning all expression is an appropriate solution.