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Two friends, and I’m sure there will be more, sent me a link to this news piece. It seems, once again, Wayne County, Indiana, my hometown has made the top of a list.

Sigh.

Long ago I worked for an institution, which shall go unnamed here, which was struggling financially, losing money and clients in record numbers. The problems were large, and stemmed from several key factors: location, federal regulations, and the overall economy. The administrators in charge were worried. They had meetings. They had retreats. They had brainstorming sessions.

And they came up with an idea: Let’s institute a dress code! That’s it!

So they did. A three page, typed, single-spaced dress code. It specified everything: the length of your skirt, the type of pants you could and could not wear, the need for socks, pantyhose, and appropriate “undergarments.” There was even a little paragraph about “toe cleavage.” Yes, dear blog readers, toe cleavage. Apparently this is a terrible thing for the world to see. It induces mind-wandering, lustful thoughts, an inattention to detail. You know.

Following the announcement of the dress code there were, predictably, more meetings. As employees, we were schooled in what to wear. And what not. Should we dare to dress inappropriately? We would be sent straight home to change our clothes. And yes. We had to come back.

Fast forward. How is this institution doing today? Post dress code? Ah. Two years after the dress code, this little struggling institution was bought out by a bigger one. The administrators that invented the dress code have all dispersed to other jobs, in other places. And is the dress code still in place? I have no idea. I rather hope not.

So, a prediction: a few years from now, Richmond High School will still be here. High schools don’t get bought out. Not the way little businesses do. What we really want to know, however is this: will there still be a dress code?. There probably will be. Sorry kids.

Then the most important question, more important than plaids or stripes or logos or god forbid even toe cleavage: Will the graduation rate be better than, say, 68%? I doubt it. But let’s be positive and say that it will. And if it is, will someone — a superintendent, or a school board member, or maybe a teacher in the high school itself — heartily and happily claim a correlation between the existence of a dress code and this little uptick in the graduation rate?

They probably will.