One question for the (female) school sup't who likes to make female students bend over

Superintendent Bass is said to have said, "If you’re not comfortable with bending over, we might have a problem." She doesn't think she did anything inappropriate.

by Ken

You know how sometimes you wish you could ask someone in the news just one question? That's how I felt when I read this report by ThinkProgress's Igor Volsky (links onsite):

School Superintendent Asks Female Students To Bend Over During Dress Code Check

A school superintendent in Noble, Oklahoma allegedly asked female students to bend over during a dress code check on the first week of school and claimed, “If you’re not comfortable with bending over, we might have a problem.”

Students at Noble High School report that the superintendent, Ronda Bass, kicked off a school assembly by saying, “Have y’all ever seen any ‘skanks’ around this school . . . I don’t want to see anyone’s ass hanging out of their shorts.” She later completed another dress code check, singling out just the female students.

Several students were sent home “crying and humiliated,” KFOR reports, and now parent are also raising concerns over how their daughters were treated. They’ve started a petition demanding that she step down.

For her part, Bass denies doing anything inappropriate and says she was trying to protect her students from the names others were calling them. “The message I wanted to send to them was I don’t want them to be called those names,” she told KFOR. “I want us to be known as the classy lady Bears.”

The incident is just the latest installment in a long line of examples of schools telling girls to cover up so they don’t distract their male peers. Critics worry that these policies teach girls that it’s their responsibility to prevent themselves from being ogled, rather than teaching boys to have the self-control to refrain from objectifying their classmates.

And my question -- okay, my question with a follow-up question or two -- would be:

Did anyone with the power to make you do it ever order you to bend over?

My follow-up would be:

How did it make you feel?

Or, if it has never happened to you:

How do you think it would have made you feel?

And if by chance you had (or might have had) some objection, would it have answered your objections if the person giving the order had explained, "If you’re not comfortable with bending over, we might have a problem"?

As I understand it, law-enforcement people can make you do it (assuming the genders align correctly), and health-care professionals. But apart from that, I really have to wonder. I know that Superintendent Bass thinks she's just trying to protect her students, but like I said, seeing as how she's so confident that she didn't do anything inappropriate, I just had this one question I wished I could have asked her.

#