You could consult an attorney if you wanted to, civil rights, but you wont have much to discuss, and it will be expensive becasuse you have no damages for them to pursue. The school can restrict your presence at the school, and unless your son has an IEP, they are free to keep him out of the classroom for as long as they wish, for what ever diciplinary infraction you signed off on in the student code of conduct, which you would be required to sign before your son would be allowed in school. Even if he had an IEP, they could hold him out for ten days before they had to answer for it, and then only to determine if his misbehavior was due to his disablity. As long as the school provides your son with educational benefit such that he makes a year of progress, they have not done anything that can get them into legal trouble.
If you want to address the school board becasue you do not like the policy, you can do that without an attorney. You will need to write to the school boards attorney and get a copy of the proceedures for addressing the school board and getting on the agenda. You must play by their rules, much like your son. There are many things that are not legal issues that parents can change. However, unless you are part of a large group of parents who is of a like mind, it is probably going to fall on deaf ears. The reasons they have these policies will be far more beneficial to the school boards liability than your personal discomfort. You are out of gas.
Martha
You are about to get an earful now...from someone who used to sue school districts in Texas...change is not a dead end, you are stamping your feet when you said that because so many of us told you in so many words that from our perspective, what you were upset about was unreasonable. If there are other reasons that you did not state in your post that make you want to change this rule that is more reasonable than what you wrote, then go for it! What you are up against is something called "site based management" and I can promise you, the school board will defend that principal to the death over something so trivial as what you posted, unless there is a lot more to what you said.
It is unlikely that a law student will be able to help you do anything more than research, one of the first things they learn is that they cannot practice law until they are admitted to the bar. You do not need a law student. Texas Educational Code is at your fingertips on the web. Read it. Here is a tip for you from an educational advocate who dealt whe TEC all the time when I lived in Texas: You may think that there are so many laws here in the United States that you can add up together when they are voloated simultainously, but you can't. TEC is what matters here. Your son's "freedom of expression" to wear what ever he pleases ends at the school doors, which is why you have no damages (read, all that an attorney is interested in, because that is how they win and get paid.) There is no violation of TEC if they hold your son out of class for any amount of time, unless he has a disablity, then, they can pretty much do it anyway, but have to follow another set of rules about it. TEC codifies Federal statues, one of which is NCLB. As I said, as long as your son makes one year of progress in one year, or close to that, they have met the standard in TEC that covers them on the NCLB and they can hold your son out of class as much as they please. My suspicion is that the belt is more important than you think...by making the belt manditory, and applying the rule to every child in the same way, they prevent gang memebers or wanna be gang members from wearing pants that fall down. Same reason that they do not allow girls to wear bandanas anymore. They apply the rule to everyone to weed out the few that they target. Do you want them to wait for the parent of a suspected gang memeber to get to the school to bring their child a belt? How long do you think that might take?
The other ladies have covered why you are not allowed to visit (legal, btw) but you can volunteer. Let me give you another clue...if you make a stink and appear litigous they will not welcome you to volunteer either. I have been in that category, and as an advocate for special ed kids, my own school district in Texas had me on a list of unwelcomed individuals. Fair, no, but leagal, you bet. Since I made a habbit of suing them under IDEA and TEC (allowed by advocates under federal law) they did not want me there gathering information, and as soon as you appear to be that way, you will be on that list too. Your access will actually be less than before. I could only be in my own child's school with an escort. Each district employs a lawyer. They have an office on the campus of your adminstration building. They attend frequent seminars and conferences about the rules and regulations and reveiw hearing officers decisions and 5th circut decisions about every single ruling. They know how far they can go.
You poo pooed a lot of answers here from some people who did know the answer. For instance, Marda gave you very good advice. She discussed Site Based Management which is HUGE in Texas. In essance, the principal has the discression to do what ever he needs to do to run the school. When I told you to write and ask for a copy of the rules to speak to the board, I knew that the rules were going to tell you that if you have not addressed this issue with your princlipal first, they won't put you on the agenda. BTW, these rules are not published. You must write to get a copy, and the reason you must write your letter to the attorney is that they want to know who has taken the time to find out what the procedure is, because if you do not follow the procedure to the letter, they have every right to ignore everything you say and do, so that is part of the trigger that gets you in the door, whether you want to open that door is another question. That is standard pracitce to frame questions in terms of being only about the principals decisions, and it will be the very first question you get from the board. That way, the whole incident has been subject to Site based management, and the issue you will be discussing is in their court, thier langague, all about the decision of the principal, and nothing else. It simplifiies things. Either the board sees a glaring issue with the conduct of the principal, or they don't. Principals go to a great number of conferences themselves, and they know exactly where the lines are. If you have a principal who is overstepping those lines, you might get the attention of the board, but know this, by the time a parent complaint gets to the board of education it is framed in only one way: how did the principal handle this sitiuation, and was he following district policy and/ or did the site based management meet the expectation fo the district.
If you want legal advice, you need to employ a lawyer. I don't know why you would, but that is your answer. If you don't like that, you won't like what the lawyer says either. There is not a lawyer who just specializes in schools doing the right thing in general, if you want to pursue wearing clothing the way you want, that is a civil right, but nothing else you are after has a specialty, and for good reason, because each of the issues related to the alphebet soup that is educational law (TEC, IDEA, NCLB, ADA, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act, Title IX, and on and on and on...) has its own set of rules related to something called "Administrative Exhaustion" which means that you must start with the very smallest individual in that complaint process, and proceed all the way to the top, with resolution (read-rejection) of your complaint not just possible, but probably at every level. Each one is separate. You may have elements of each one that add up to something in your family, but in reality, you cannot add them together to form one complaint. The problems with each would have to be so egreigous that each makes a stand and creates damages that have a remedy all on thier own.
If the situation with your son being out of the classroom rose to the situation of him failing, that would change things, and your son would be passed to an IAT (Intervention Assistance Team) and would be evaluated for disablities or moved into the diciplinary placement that intersects with either Juvinile delinquncy programs or alternative school placements. The focus will be your son, not the behavior of the school. Even if your son is both disabled and a delinquent, you cannot add up his rights under IDEA and the Family court, they are both dealt with seperately. IDEA deals with diciplinary situations related to FAPE before they move into the justice system, but once they are there, forget about it. If you are freaking out because your situation is not like this, know that there is not much inbetween site based manangement, and what I am describing, except a whole lot of heartache. No family wants to open any of these kettles of fish; we only do so when there is no other choice available. Is your situation worth it?
For the life of me, I am really trying to understand what about your situation could rise to this need. I understand being an Advocate (that is what I do) but one of the first things I learned was that everything that pisses me off is not actionable. Sometimes, we just live with what pisses us off.
M