Texas ACLU Finds Dress Codes of 51 School Districts Violate CROWN Act

In 2023, Greg Abbott signed HB 567, also known as the Crown Act, into law to ban hair discrimination in schools and workplaces.

Since then, many school districts have altered their dress codes to adjust to the new regulations put in place by the CROWN Act. However, the ACLU of Texas found that, still, many districts in Texas have not changed their dress codes. Conservative judges have sided with school districts that are refusing to change their dress codes, pushing civil rights organizations to fight back.

In response to many districts still not making the necessary changes, the ACLU sent letters to 51 independent school districts across the state, which appear to still be in violation of the Texas CROWN Act in their 2023-2024 dress and grooming codes. The letters demanded that the districts update their policies to comply with the law."

In February of this year, the ACLU of Texas published a dress code report titled "Dressed To Express: How Dress Codes Discriminate Against Texas Students and Must Be Changed," which reviewed the 2022-2023 dress and grooming codes for nearly every district in the state. It found that overall, more than 80% of surveyed districts had vague hair policies that can disproportionately punish Black students and that 7% of those dress codes banned or restricted hair textures and styles associated with race, many of which are explicitly protected by the CROWN Act. The report also revealed many school districts had discriminatory policies that unequally targeted students based on gender, race, LGBTQIA+ identity, religion, disability, and socioeconomic backgrounds."

Organizations like Equality Texas, the Texas Freedom Network, and the NAACP Legal Defense Fund (among many others) have all signed these letters and have demanded change in districts that are violating the CROWN Act.

You can read a copy of the letters sent to school districts violating the CROWN Act here. For a list of the districts which received a letter from the ACLU and for more information on the situation, you can read the ACLU's findings.