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High School Bikini Brouhaha Goes National

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BY KEVIN O'HORAN / Sarasota Herald-Tribune

Published: October 18, 2007

Updated: 10/18/2007 12:39 pm

BRADENTON - For years, fans at professional and college football games have bared their bodies and painted themselves to show their spirit.

The trend has made its way to high school games, and so far it has been accepted practice -- for boys.

But when two 17-year-old girls at a Manatee High School football game recently donned bikini tops
and painted their torsos, they were kicked out of the stadium.

Their removal and subsequent claims of a double standard have whipped up a media storm that has grown to national proportions.

Some support the school principal, who received complaints about the girls' and says he offered them shirts to cover their bodies.

Others say the girls are right: That it is patently unfair that boys can go shirtless and paint themselves but girls cannot show school spirit in a similar fashion.

There even was a piece on a national TV show Wednesday morning.

In Manatee, the issue has led to a review of dress codes and has the school board ready to require a shirt on any student at a game.

"We'll have to look at that as maybe just a blanket standard," school board chairman Harry Kinnan said.

"Obviously there are, in all of our dress codes, there are different standards for young ladies than there are for young men. I do think that's something that we do have to look at: How can we be consistent?"

Kinnan said he expected the issue to be discussed at the board meeting Monday.

The whole issue began innocuously enough.

Jessyca Altenbach and Monica Cummings, both seniors at Manatee High, showed up for the school's Oct. 12 homecoming game sporting torsos slathered in the school's red and blue colors -- painted to look like shirts, complete with short sleeves.

"Three, four weeks earlier, we saw our guy friends had done it at a home game," said Altenbach, an honors student with a scholarship to attend Florida State University. "We said, 'Let's do it at the next home game.' "

The girls wore bikini tops to bare enough space for the paint.

They bought tickets at the stadium and grabbed seats in the stands.

A dozen or so people from a crowd of thousands that night complained to school staff, some going so far as to say it looked like the girls were topless. A high school employee, acting on orders of Manatee Principal Robert Gagnon, pulled the girls out of the stands and told them to cover up
or leave.

"The bottom line is people found it offensive," Gagnon said. "It's a precedent-setting thing. If I don't do something, ... I'm saying kids can wear bikinis to football games."

That, he said, is strictly forbidden by the school district's dress code. And, he said, allowing bikinis at the game would have set the school up for other problems, like having to decide when a bikini top is too small or how to protect bikini-wearing girls as they jostle through the throngs of people who attend games.

"That's the last thing I want to do, is put a kid in a bikini walking through a crowd," Gagnon said. "I did the right thing."

The girls stood their ground Wednesday.

Just out of a limousine after discussing the situation on a local radio show, and only hours after appearing on national morning news shows, Altenbach and Cummings maintained they were wronged.

Manatee High officials, the girls said, cleared the idea in advance -- a claim disputed by Gagnon. Just a handful of people spoke against the outfits at the game, they said, and the stands for homecoming night, as with most home games, were filled with bare-chested boys adorned with plenty
of body paint.

Only the girls were asked to cover up or head home.

"I thought it was a double standard," Altenbach said. "I don't understand why a guy can do it, but when we do, we get in trouble. If we cover up what we need to, it shouldn't be a problem.

"We were discriminated against."

Cummings, a catcher and outfielder on Manatee High's girls softball team, added: "I don't think it's right at all. We want to be able to show our school spirit."

They can, Kinnan said. Just ditch the body paint and bikinis for some face paint and T-shirts.

"There is dress acceptable for work, dress acceptable for social situations and dress acceptable for school," he said. "There are different standards of acceptability.

"I think for school functions, however enthusiastic the school spirit of the young people might have been, I think when it causes many other people to be uncomfortable, as it apparently did, then I think the administration has the right to address that."

Gagnon acted under the authority given Manatee principals -- similar to their Sarasota counterparts -- to interpret the district's code of conduct for students. He interpreted the code to apply to football games and enforced dress code clauses that bar "beachwear," "bare midriffs" and "clothing ... that may be a distraction."

Next time, if there is one, there might not be so much latitude.

"I'm going to ask the superintendent to address that as a countywide thing," Kinnan said. "If it needs to be a policy, or a written dress code that spells things out for everyone, then that's what we'll do."

Gagnon draws a hard line.

"We know where this is going," he said. "It will be just like McDonald's: no shoes, no shirt, no service."

While Altenbach and Cummings agree that might be the outcome, a decision they say would be fair for everyone, it is not the hoped-for result.

"I don't want to see guys not be able to do it," Cummings said. "We want to be able to go to games together and do things like this."

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