The New Shoe Rule

by Alice Sauvageau and Yamina Djamai

Since the beginning of the 2017-2018 school year, every student of the Collège Saint-Charles-Garnier has to wear leather or suede shoes. They inevitably have to be black, and the height of the sole has to be of two centimeters or less.

Of course, this new rule makes a lot of students angry, because they can no longer wear their favorite pair of shoes to go to school. However, because no special brand or store is mentioned, the students have a lot of choices and most of them have found shoes they like and could even wear outside the school.  

That does not make the students more likely to be pleased by the rule. In fact, at the end of last year, two students named Héloise L’Homme and Rosalie Thérien started a petition against the shoe rule. They agreed for the colour aspect, but not for the material that was asked for. Also, they stated that it was perhaps not ideal to impose a new standard to the obligatory school uniform for the students that were going in secondary 5, because that meant they would have to pay new shoes for only one year.

The girls had a meeting with Mr Séguin, but even if they worked very hard to convince almost every student of secondary 4 to participate in their revolution, they did not change his mind. Unfortunately for the students who signed the paper Héloise and Rosalie passed around for almost two weeks, the petition did not work.

Now of course, imposing shoes will make the school professional team have a lot less to do on the authority side. Yes, there was a rule for shoes before, but the students did not always respect it and the teachers always had a hard time knowing whether or not one of their coworkers had warned them before.

To conclude, even if the rule does not please a majority of students, it has its benefits.