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

A New Normal

Friday morning when I walked onto campus, everything felt different. Teachers were being way more careful about what they said and how they looked at students.

You could feel the boundaries had been reset. Some staff members looked angry about it and kept their heads down in the hallways; most seemed relieved to have clearer rules about what was okay and what wasn’t.

Students were talking about the board meeting in every class. A few weeks later, Lucille’s final article about everything won some regional high school journalism award.

She called me asking for another interview about what comes next. I told her the real work was making sure the new policies actually got used and enforced.

We couldn’t just celebrate and then let everything slide back to how it was before. The student advisory committee held its first meeting on a Tuesday after school.

Six students, including me and Alyssa, sat around a table with two board members and a district lawyer. We spent two hours going through every line of the old dress code and talking about what was wrong with it.

The lawyer took notes on everything we said. We worked on creating language that was actually fair and didn’t target specific body types or genders.

It was boring work but important. Mr. Silas actually got recognized by the district for supporting student voice the right way.

He told me privately after school one day that speaking up had been scary for him too.

“Some things matter more than keeping your job safe, though.” He said.

He said he was proud of all of us for pushing back instead of just accepting how things were. Alyssa and I became actual friends through this whole experience.

It wasn’t in a romantic way like some people assumed and gossiped about; we just understood what each other had been through. We checked in regularly about how we were processing everything.

Sometimes we talked about the hearing or the protest; sometimes we just hung out and didn’t mention any of it. We both needed someone who got it without having to explain.

The new dress code took three weeks of committee work to finalize. It ended up being gender-neutral and focused on health and safety instead of whether clothes were distracting.

It included a requirement that students had to have input on any future policy changes. The board voted to approve it at their next meeting.

When the final version got posted on the school website, I read through it twice. It wasn’t perfect, but it was so much better than what we’d started with.

There was no more targeting girls for having bodies; no more pretending students were responsible for adult teachers not controlling themselves; clear rules that applied to everyone the same way.

Three months after the board meeting, Margarite sent an email to everyone involved saying her investigation was officially closed. The final report ran forty-seven pages, documenting every pattern of inappropriate behavior, every policy failure, and every gap in our school’s systems for protecting students.

The district posted it publicly on their website along with schedules for mandatory staff training and new reporting channels students could actually use. Reading through that report felt strange because it turned everything we’d lived through into official documented facts with bullet points and legal language.

Margarite had interviewed over thirty students and fifteen staff members. She’d reviewed five years of dress code enforcement data showing girls got written up at three times the rate of boys for identical clothing.

She documented how the all-male policy committee never consulted female students or staff about the dress code they created. The report included direct quotes from Mr. Cortonhorst’s overheard conversation and testimony from multiple girls about his pattern of comments.

It laid out exactly how the school’s response to Alyssa’s complaints had violated Title 9 by prioritizing staff comfort over student safety. The district was now required to submit quarterly reports showing they were actually following through on all the changes they’d promised.

A week after the report came out, Mr. Cortonhorst submitted his resignation letter rather than face a formal disciplinary hearing where everything would become part of his permanent record. The district accepted it immediately.

Coach Creeperson got transferred to some district office job processing equipment orders where he wouldn’t have any contact with students. He kept his salary and benefits, which felt like he got off easy, but at least he was gone from campus.

Some people wanted bigger consequences, wanted them fired without benefits or prosecuted or publicly shamed. I got why people felt that way, but having their behavior officially documented and them removed from positions where they could hurt more students felt like something real we’d actually accomplished.

The consequences weren’t dramatic or satisfying in a revenge kind of way; they were just permanent and recorded in official files that would follow these guys to any future education jobs. That mattered more than I’d expected it to.

Looking back now, as second semester starts, I feel proud of what we managed to do, even though it cost us so much time and stress and some friendships that didn’t survive the tension. We proved students can actually push back against systems that aren’t fair and sometimes win if we’re willing to document everything and keep showing up even when it gets uncomfortable.

The school is measurably safer because we refused to accept that girls’ bodies were the problem instead of teachers who couldn’t control their own behavior. The policy changes are permanent and written into official district guidelines now.

The reporting systems are actually functioning with a dedicated coordinator who takes complaints seriously. Future students will benefit from boundaries we fought to establish without having to go through what Alyssa and the other girls went through.

That matters more than any dramatic ending could have. Well, that’s the grand finale, if you can call it that.

If you’re still here, you clearly have questionable taste, but I respect the dedication. Go on, subscribe and see how much worse it gets next.