Shirts give teens a chance to talk about dying young

Keeping children safe on public school campuses is rightfully a full-time concern for school administrators and for parents who trust them to do that.

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But when school officials tip the balance between liberty and security too far, often the measures they employ not only wrongly encroach on students' rights, they also do little to achieve security anyway.

The ever-changing list of banned items a high school student may wear is a good example. These lists started in the 1980s when certain gang members were given to wearing various colors.

Today, as gangs themselves keep changing their attire, so are innocent teenagers finding themselves in unwitting violation of the ever-changing gang-item code.

Last month, as the Tribune's Hayley Ringle reported, Queen Creek High School students designed, sold and wore about 40 T-shirts memorializing a 17-year-old friend who was shot and killed days before. A student told Ringle proceeds went to help the family of Anibal Mendoza. Police arrested three people Aug. 17 in connection with his death, Ringle reported.

A photo of the shirts ran in the Tribune. They contain no offensive language, little more than the boy's name and dates of birth and death.

But when they refused to change their shirts when school officials ordered them to, the principal cited them for defiance, Ringle reported, because the school's dress code bans "any attire deemed to be gang-related or affiliated with a negative group," which includes these shirts.

These codes are often famous for their overbroad nature, and Queen Creek's is no exception. "Deemed to be gang-related" obviously means whatever the principal says it is, of course, and "negative group" could be anybody, including any political party that isn't your own.

Even so, when gang members decide on a new form of personal adornment, that is no license given the state to dictate to law-abiding teenagers that now their attire must conform anew.

Take the example of Tabitha Ruiz. KSAZ-TV (Channel 10) carried a story Tuesday from Fox's Dallas affiliate about the Seagoville, Texas, teen, whose high school barred her from wearing a rosary around her neck on campus.

You see, her school dubbed it a gang-related item.

Ruiz received the silver-and-ruby-beaded rosary from her mother as a child, long before Seagoville High School decided that rosaries don't stand for the Catholic faith as much as for gang activity.

According to KDFW-TV, the girl's family is contemplating a lawsuit.

Certainly a teenager won't see his or her free-speech rights significantly reduced if he or she may not wear a do-rag or a bandanna at school. The same goes for shirts with messages youths should not see on campus, such as those advocating liquor or drug use, which some districts have already banned.

But the adults in these situations might want to pause to consider a valuable teachable moment these memorial shirts provide.

Rather than merely the latest fashion labels staring at young people from their classmates' clothing each day, perhaps the sight of a shirt remembering a dead teenager might encourage high school students to talk with each other about violence and young death, and how final it all really is.