Dress code for today: Convict casual

By BOB HILL, The Courier-Journal, August 19, 1999

Good morning, Jefferson County schoolchildren. Now that all those reporters, photographers and live-action (can there be dead action?) cams have left your bus compound, it is time to get on with the business at hand: building a better basketball team.

NO, WAIT a minute. Make that your academic portfolio. Instinctive precocious words from the heart. We'll worrie abut yer speling, latyr.

I understand how difficult this first week of school can be, mostly because all of you would rather be in Florida. Get over it. There comes a time in life when you have to suck it up, put your uniform pants on one leg at a time, win one for the Zipper.

Speaking of which, many of you -- and by that I really mean you rabble-rousing, anti-dress-code, anarchist hippies at Atherton High School -- have somehow decided your individual rights mean more than having your whole school dress like a 1950s glee club.

You do that only because you never met Cora Christian, my 1950s eighth-grade teacher who once slapped Ernie Byrd on the butt with a paddle the size of Nova Scotia because Ernie had not properly tucked his shirt into his pants. Ernie was lucky. Students who went into Miss Christian's class without wearing belts were never heard from again.

YOU ATHERTON students are only acting out because you lack role models in your lives, like Jim and Patti Hearn. Jim Hearn, who was once chairman of your own school board, and Patti, who was your deputy superintendent, took time from their busy schedules to sell encyclopedias to needy schools.

The only thing missing from this equation was the encyclopedias, for which the Hearns were paid -- are you math majors listening carefully? -- precisely $322,485.

That may seem like a lot of money to you students earning $5.50 an hour shoving fast food through small windows to make insurance payments on your Honda Accords. But Patti Hearn -- unlike you rabble-rousing Atherton hippies -- understood the value of dressing for success. She earned more than $100,000 a year while strutting her way through an administration so dazzled by clothes that the actual encyclopedias didn't matter.

THE POINT being, of course, that clothes do matter, and we all know that is true because Jim and Patti eventually were sentenced to precisely nine months in jail for stealing $322,485 while more poorly dressed miscreants who relieve perfectly solvent banks of $1,432 are sentenced to life plus 450 years. But didn't Patti look nice in court.

Jefferson Circuit Judge Stephen Mershon became the subject of some criticism for that sentence, but you students of academic scheduling must surely realize he had his reasons. Nine months is a full school year, and even the Hearns will need time off for a summer vacation. Maybe even go to Florida. Only they will be going to North Carolina -- and here comes your lesson in American cynicism -- because like precisely 100 percent of the people who find themselves in or near the slammer, the Hearns found religion even as the rest of your school system was trying to find the encyclopedias. They found it -- here comes your geography lesson -- in the resort area of Nags Head, N.C., the famed Outer Banks, where they can do 500 hours of community service among the sun worshipers.

They'll suffer along on Patti Hearn's $62,000 per year pension from your school system -- less $1,600 a month in remaining restitution, a total of $195,000 payable over 10 years. Without interest. You math majors can figure out what a sweetheart deal that is.

The rest of you get out there and buy some decent clothes.

Return to main page.