By Caspar von Hollen ‘26, Humor Writer

The original dress code was written on a document similar to this. Image courtesy of Dreamstime

I was lamenting the amount of history reading I had one night when I googled, “What are the 10 longest books of all time?” I was expecting to see old ones only my mom had heard of, but instead, I saw “The Newark Academy Dress Code.” 

After using the PDF finding skills English class has taught me, I found a copy of the ancient document, but couldn’t understand a word hidden behind the endless dependent clauses. Years of Chromebooks in middle school taught me to be a crafty student, so I quickly highlighted the whole document and copied and pasted it into ChatGPT. After asking the AI to “explain it to me like I’m a fifth grader” more times than I’d like to admit, I could finally understand the archaic text. 

In true Newark Academy fashion, the book didn’t get straight to the point. It started by explaining why the school needed a dress code, but before that, explained why we needed to explain why the school needed a dress code, and before all of that, it had a long prologue on the history of dress codes. Without second thought I skipped past the prologue as quickly as possible. 

The dress code was written by the second head of school, whom nobody has heard about since he just barely missed the cut for all of the 250th-anniversary videos we’ve been shown. The yellowed pages created a never-seen-before system of dress code where the students had a “minimum fabric quota” to reach by the end of the year. This meant that if a student wanted to wear shorts during the winter, they would have to melt in a sweatshirt and jeans in June. Missing the quota would result in the punishment of sitting in the middle of a row at Morning Meeting. To get there, one would have to clamber over other students who, having been in bed just half an hour ago, refuse to stand up and let others through. 

Students, however, found a loophole, as they often do. They realized that they could walk in the door with plenty of clothes on, but then remove layers once they got into the school. Soon the school was left looking like a landfill of clothes. Clothes were everywhere on the floors. In response, the head of school turned down the heat in random rooms throughout the building so that students would be forced to keep all of their layers on, but it wasn’t enough. The school was still plagued by its dress code. 

As their last resort, the school hired young Ms. Galvin to reform the dress code and solve the problem. Ms. Galvin took to the Morning Meeting podium. She redirected her focus from combating back-packs being left in hallways to clothes. She warned that any clothes removed after entering the school would not be put in the lost and found, rather, they would be put in the lost and kept. Ms. Galvin put the problem to rest once and for all, not by removing the outdated system, but by increasing the fabric quota. To make the quota achievable, Mrs. Galvin lifted the ban on sweatpants and hoodies, but not pajama pants, appealing to both students and dead principals. 

I awoke the next morning in all my clothes from the day before and with the lights in my room still on. Like the Chromebooks that taught me, my energy had been completely drained by looking at the PDF for too long. To avoid any antiquated rules I may have missed, I bundled up in my entire wardrobe and headed off to school feeling like a giant marshmallow.