St Martin Parish School Board: Fill & Download for Free

Dress codes in American schools keep people from showing up in inappropriate clothing. They also are used to prove a student should have known what not to wear to school and covers the school when the student shows up in something they arent allowed to wear. Unfortunately, the people determining what is and isn’t ok often make these rules based on their own personal biases. I've seen multiple sexist rules that have eventually been changed because they aren't legally sound… like telling male students they can't wear long hair only because of gender. Currently, many rules about the way female students dress are showing up in the media with the reason being that the females are distracting to the males when wearing certain articles of clothing.However, your question has an incorrect assumption. There are American public schools where uniforms are required. The schools where I live decided they wanted the uniform, sold it as keeping students from being bullied about their clothing, that clothing would no longer be a distraction, and that students wouldn't spend their morning trying to decide what to wear. Then, questionnaires were sent out asking if uniforms were mandatory, what color would parents prefer. There was no question about whether parents wanted uniforms. There was no answer that said I don't want uniforms. Only color options were given. The following school year, uniforms were required and the school board said that the parents had voted for it. People fell for it and never questioned the decision. So Lafayette Parish Schools in Louisiana have been requiring uniforms since about 1995. I've lived in Orleans and Lafourche Parish and the majority of their public schools also require uniforms (interestingly very similar in style and color) as well as Iberia, St. Martin, St. Mary, and Terrebonne parishes, too (I’ve either worked in or visited these places).

My father’s generation still spoke French as their first language, but a lot of the people in his generation didn’t teach my generation how to speak it. The school board in Louisiana decided at one point that only English would be spoken in school and students who did speak it were spanked. Imagine, if you will, that your native language, the only language you’ve ever spoken, is forbidden and you’re in school and you don’t know how to ask in the language allowed if you can go to the restroom. And when you’ve figured English out, your priest comes over from the church next door to your school and gets his jollies by speaking to you in French and expects you to respond in kind and your teacher catches you. So we didn’t learn French and we didn’t go to church.My mother isn’t Cajun and only speaks English, so I would hear my father speaking French only when we were in Louisiana with his family. So it was also not surprising we didn’t learn considering that my early childhood was spent on Naval Ports/Bases in the United States and my dad was often away on deployment. Who was going to teach me French if he was never home and we didn’t live in Louisiana? So I grew up not really hearing it and not picking up the accent.When he was discharged and we moved back to Louisiana, we had a French teacher with CODOFIL from Quebec come in to teach us French and I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I didn’t understand that it wasn’t my father’s French. I did realize that it didn’t appear that my classmates had spoken French, either. And then we moved to a smaller community in a more rural town and I had a lot of classmates who did speak a smattering of Cajun French. Enough to make me feel like I had no clue what I was doing in my French classes. I don’t think the next generation has learned much of it at all, though.The areas where you are most likely to hear it being spoken are the rural areas of the Acadiana parishes… Lafayette Parish, St Landry Parish, Iberia Parish, St. Martin Parish, Ascension Parish, Assumption Parish, Avoyelles Parish, Calcasieu Parish, Cameron Parish, Evangeline Parish, Iberville Parish, Jefferson Davis Parish, Lafourche Parish, Point Coupee Parish, St. Charles Parish, St. James Parish, St. John the Baptist Parish, St. Mary Parish, Terrebonne Parish, Vermilion Parish, and West Baton Rouge Parish.

The Council for the Development of French in Louisiana (CODOFIL) was developed to reverse the decline of the use of French in the state in 1968. This led to a great deal of criticism because not only was there an emphasis on teaching students International French rather than Cajun French, but they also used Francophone teachers (people from France, Belgium, and Canada) rather than local teachers who spoke French. I remember my French teacher in 1975 was from Quebec.The reason this even needed to be done is because in 1915, the state board of education decided to ban the use of French in public schools. In 1921, the Louisiana Constitution prohibited any language other than English in public school. People were still speaking it at home, but most of these people were only able to speak it. They couldn’t read or write it. And this shows, in my opinion, in how people who do still speak Cajun French say things and attempt to write them. My father was born in 1947 and his first language was Cajun French. And when he went to school, as I understand it, the school next to the church in Cankton, he was beaten for speaking French. So when he married, his wife wasn’t Cajun and didn’t speak or understand French and they didn’t teach their kids to speak Cajun French.I’ve taken French classes for many years. A little in second grade when the teacher from Quebec would stop by. I am under the impression that she was shared by several schools other than Carencro Heights and we didn’t see her often. Lot of good that did. When we moved to St. Martin Parish two years later, half the students took French classes regularly and half didn’t. I was in the classes that didn’t take French. When I got to seventh grade, we took French for a third of the school year, so 12 weeks. The other 24 weeks of school was split between geography and art. In eighth grade, I took French the entire school year. It wasn’t offered again until I was a junior in high school, when I took it my junior and senior year. Then, in college, I took two semesters of college level International French. Right now, I am probably as fluent as a 5 year old French child. Maybe. I read and write it better than I speak it. I suck at conversational French and yet I tended to be one of the best students in every French class I’ve ever taken. So if I can’t speak it, neither can the majority of all of the students I’ve taken the class with. I heard more fluency from people taking Japanese classes at the university I attended.My opinion is that the original complaints were correct. The Louisiana school board and the state government took Cajun French away and then gave it back… but not really. They gave us French but not the French that our families spoke. Had I been speaking my father’s language, maybe my ability to converse in the language I spent so many years trying to learn would have been a lot better because I would have had him to work with me on it. I remember after his parents passed away, and their siblings began doing the same, my dad complained that he was losing his native language because there wasn’t anyone to speak it with. I see my family members on online genealogy forums trying to use French terms they think they know and writing them so wrong that it’s obvious they’ve never taken a French class in their lives. I still live in Acadiana, the heart of Cajun Country, and unless I’m listening to Cajun music, I never hear anyone speaking French. So I think CODOFIL has been a colossal failure. This is my opinion, of course. I don’t know what the statistics are and would be suspicious that CODOFIL was skewing the numbers. I expected after nearly 49 years that CODOFIL would have done more and now I wonder how they are still relevant when my generation, the generation born when CODOFIL was first conceived, is middle aged and few of us speak French… and our elders are steadily dying, taking their language along with them.