ST. AUGUSTINE, Fla. – As part of a years-long probe into how the St. Johns County School District imposed its dress code policy, the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights worked with the district to circulate a questionnaire to groups of students at five district schools.
Students at Bartram Trail High School, Nease High School, Creekside High School, St. Augustine High School and Switzerland Point Middle School received a link to the online survey, which asked students about the number of times they’d received a warning or discipline for violating the district’s dress code policy.
On Wednesday, the survey link was deleted after it had been widely shared outside the school community, jeopardizing the quality and accuracy of the results, according to a district spokeswoman.
The federal Title IX investigation was launched in 2021, following multiple complaints by parents and students who claimed that the code was discriminatory toward female students in both how it was written and how it was being imposed. The district later turned over a cache of documents and records which the OCR had requested as part of the investigation.
St. Johns County School District came under widespread scrutiny after heavily edited images of female students were published to the Spring 2021 school yearbook at Bartram Trail High School.
District leaders said the yearbook editing was a mistake and acknowledged that the dress code needed to be revised and updated, which happened over the subsequent months.
“We are fully cooperating with the investigation,” district spokeswoman Christina Upchurch said. “We have made changes to the dress code since the initial complaint was filed in a 2021. These changes support a gender-neutral dress code and were made based on public and school board input, research of other districts and the topic of school board workshops. The changes were also included in trainings for staff responsible for enforcing the dress code.”