When people think of Mount Michael what do they think of? The academics? The athletics? The joyful faculty? But what about the dress code?  

Mount Michael is widely known for its formal dress code in the winter and more casual dress code in the spring and fall. With students being required to wear a button-down shirt with a tie, a belt, and dress pants during the winter months, many students believe that it is the strictest dress code in the state. What stands out the most, however, is the duration they have to wear the winter dress code.  

From the first day of October to the last day of April, every student is required to wear pants and a dress shirt, regardless of how hot it is outside. As the spring blooms and the temperature rises, students are given no choice but to swelter and boil in winter dress while they pray for the administration to let them wear spring dress. Their prayers thus far have yet to be answered. “I like the dress code,” Rylan Pearson ‘27 said “but it goes on for far too long.”  

Some students have compared the winter dress code while in the spring to Johnny Cash’s hit song “Ring of Fire” frequently quoting the verse “And it burns, burns, burns, the ring of fire!”  

While dramatic, some students take this very seriously. John Kelly ‘26 said, “It makes the hot parts of the spring genuinely unbearable because all the rooms get hot and there’s no A/C in the Benedict building.”  

The solution to this problem is seemingly very simple. There is overwhelming student support for spring dress to be implemented April 1 rather than May 1, cutting winter dress down a whole month.   

“I would love that,” Ben Alessandro ‘27 said. “I feel like towards the end of April the temperature gets to be way too much.”  

With no word yet from the administration about winter dress in the spring, the students have no choice but to put their heads down when things get quite literally “heated.”