The teachers said they couldn’t control themselves around the girls.

The Cost of Standing Up

Friday morning, the paper came out during homeroom. Lucille had written a full front-page article with a headline about student protest against gendered dress code enforcement.

She quoted me directly about the policy never specifying students and about teachers needing to control themselves. By third period, the main office phone was ringing constantly.

Parents were calling to ask why their sons were protesting. Others called to complain about the school allowing boys to wear inappropriate clothing, and some just wanted to know what the hell was going on with the dress code.

Van Debette sent an email to all families before lunch claiming students had misunderstood the policy’s intent and that the administration was working to clarify the guidelines.

The email made it sound like we were confused children who didn’t understand what the rules meant instead of students who had read the actual words she posted.

That afternoon, Alyssa found me by my locker and showed me her phone. Her mom had forwarded an entire email chain between Van Debette and the district office.

The administrators were panicking about legal exposure. The district council had actually flagged the gendered language as a Title 9 problem weeks ago, before any of this started, but nobody had done anything about it.

They just ignored the legal warning and posted the policy anyway. Now, they were scrambling to figure out how to fix it without admitting they messed up.

Reading those emails felt like finding the cheat codes to a video game. They knew the policy was wrong, and they posted it anyway.

Over the weekend, some of the football players started getting pressure from their families to drop the protest and focus on the season. Parents worried about athletic scholarships and college recruiters seeing their kids involved in controversy instead of playing their best.

TJ texted the group chat Saturday night saying his dad was threatening to ground him if he kept wearing the compression gear. Three other guys posted similar messages about their parents pushing back.

Guile Perez, our team captain, sent a message calling an emergency meeting at his house Sunday afternoon. Fifteen of us showed up, crowding into his basement where his mom had put out pizza and drinks.

Guile asked everyone to talk honestly about whether we could keep going or if the cost was getting too high. Some guys admitted they were scared about losing playing time or getting benched for the rest of the season.

Others worried about their parents following through on punishment threats. Then TJ stood up.

“If we fold now, we are basically telling every girl at the school that their dignity matters less than our football season.” He said.

He asked how we could look at Alyssa or Deedee or any of the other girls and explain that we quit because sports were more important than stopping teachers from objectifying them. Nobody could argue with that.

We voted to keep supporting the protest, even if it meant risking our athletic eligibility.

A Federal Case

Monday morning felt different walking into school. Van Debette’s voice came over the intercom during first period announcements.

She said the dress code policy was clarified to explicitly include all students in the athletic wear restrictions. She emphasized that the updated language now made clear that everyone had to follow the same rules.

She actually sounded pleased with herself, like adding the words “all students” fixed everything. During second period, a student aide knocked on my calculus classroom door and handed the teacher a note.

She read it and told me to report to the principal’s office immediately. The walk down the hallway felt long.

Van Debette was waiting in her office with printed screenshots spread across her desk. The photos showed me in the hallway wearing my purple leggings, taken from the security cameras over the past week.

She slid a write-up form across the desk and explained I was cited for violating the newly clarified dress code. The form assigned me detention for three days starting tomorrow.

I asked if she was writing up everyone who wore athletic wear or just the protesters. She said the clarified policy applied to everyone equally and I should consider myself lucky it was only detention.

By lunch, fifteen other guys had detention slips too. We compared notes in the cafeteria and realized Van Debette was only targeting the core protesters, not the random students who wore athletic gear without making it political.

Alyssa’s mom texted her group chat reminding us to document everything because the pattern of selective enforcement would matter later for any legal complaint.

We took photos of our detention slips and screenshots of our documented outfits from before the clarified policy went into effect.

After school, Mr. Silas Wolf caught me in the hallway near the history wing. He pulled me aside into an empty classroom and quietly asked if I knew about the district’s Title 9 office.

I admitted I had heard of Title 9 but didn’t really understand what it meant. He explained that Title 9 was the federal law protecting students from sex discrimination in schools and that the district had an office specifically for handling complaints about gender bias.

He wrote down the website and the name of the coordinator on a piece of paper. He didn’t say he agreed with the protest or that he thought the dress code was wrong.

He just made sure I knew the proper channels existed for filing formal complaints. Then he told me to have a good evening and left before anyone could see us talking.

That night, I sat at my desk staring at the Title 9 complaint form on my laptop screen. The website looked official and kind of scary with all these legal terms and required fields.

I started typing everything from the beginning. I wrote about the original dress code policy that said girls, not students.

I included the assembly where Principal Van said the policy was meant to minimize distractions for faculty. I detailed every single comment from Cortonhorst that Alyssa had documented over the past month.

I mentioned the hallway conversation I heard between Cortonhorst and Coach about seeing everything through yoga pants. My fingers kept moving across the keyboard even when my hands started cramping.

I attached screenshots of the original policy text and uploaded photos of the detention slips Van Debette handed out only to protesters. I included timestamps and dates for every incident.

The form asked if I wanted to remain anonymous and I clicked no, because hiding felt wrong after everything we’d done. Two hours later, I hit submit and watched the confirmation screen appear, telling me someone would contact me within five business days.

The Tides Turn

Wednesday morning during first period, a woman in a dark blazer walked past our classroom window heading toward the main office. She carried a leather briefcase and wore the kind of serious expression that meant someone was about to have a very bad day.

The intercom crackled during second period and the secretary asked for Alyssa to report to the conference room immediately. Everyone in class went quiet.

Alyssa gathered her books slowly and walked out with her chin up, even though I could see her hands shaking. By lunch, the whole school knew a Title 9 investigator was on campus.

Margarite Parsons from the district office was interviewing students about the dress code and everything that led up to the protest. Kids crowded around the cafeteria tables whispering about who got called in and what questions were being asked.

The investigation felt real now in a way that made my stomach flip. Lucille caught me after lunch near my locker holding her phone up with a huge grin on her face.

She showed me her latest article about the Title 9 investigation being officially opened. The school paper site had already gotten 300 views and local education blogs were sharing the link.

One blog called it a test case for how schools handled gender-based dress code problems. Another site interviewed a lawyer who said the original policy language was pretty clearly discriminatory.

My phone buzzed with texts from people I barely knew asking if I’d seen the coverage. The protest wasn’t just our school drama anymore; it was turning into something bigger that people outside our campus actually cared about.