Is a teacher dress code and a sense of decorum coming to the Halton District School Board?

Here’s the latest update pertaining to Busty Lemieux: earlier this month, HDSB trustees approved a request to education director Curtis Ennis, 'He/Him', to craft a professionalism policy for teachers which includes a requirement to “maintain appropriate and professional standards” of dress in the classroom. The report is due on March 1. Check out this clip from the January 3 HDSB meeting:

Now, if you can believe it, there is already a dress code for HDSB students. There’s even a Halloween costume dress code. But no dress code for staff.

This apparently wasn’t a problem until Kerry Luc Lemieux aka Kayla Lemieux aka Busty Lemieux showed up to shop class at Oakville Trafalgar High School dressed as a grotesque caricature of a woman. Sporting enormous Z-cup breasts with fake nipples protruding through tight tops, Lemieux’s clothing and prosthetic boobs were tolerated and perhaps even celebrated by the HDSB as a jolly good example of the board accommodating transgenderism. Diversity is our strength and all that jazz…

Many parents and students and even Steven Lecce, the Ontario Minister of Education, begged to differ, noting that Lemieux’s costume was inappropriate and unprofessional.

Now for many observers, this idea of the HDSB investigating the viability of a dress code for teachers might come across as being a case of déjà vu all over. Well, for good reason: after all, a study about implementing a dress code for teachers was already conducted last November. That’s when the HDSB trustees actually approved a ludicrous recommendation tabled by Human Resources superintendent Sari Taha who stated that implementing a professional dress code and grooming standards would likely expose the board to “considerable liability.”

The report also claimed professionalism must be balanced with a culture of respect, equity, and inclusion, and that employers need to allow employees to express themselves according to their “lived gender.”

So in other words, anything goes. If a teacher wants to show up to class in a bathing suit or clad in dominatrix gear or donning a Spider-Man costume, hey, that’s fair dinkum based on, again, “a culture of respect, equity and inclusion, and that employers need to allow employees to express themselves.”