Good old Neil. He watched my sideburns in the interest of knowledge.

Neil (even now it seems wrong to call him by his first name) was the vice principal of my high school. Among his many jobs was enforcing the high school’s dress code, which weakened every year.

It was Neil who was in charge of making sure that my sideburns never crept below my pimply earlobes. Likewise, he was in charge of making sure no one wore an offensive T-shirt. It was Neil who had to figure out if the hippie kid with the “Things Go Better With Coke,” T-shirt was a fan of carbonated beverages or a snorter of substances illegal.

I’m thinking of poor Neil because recently there’s been a flap about junior high kids in my city who fail to wear their uniforms to school.

Some years ago, the public schools here mandated that our rap music-drenched moppets wear uniforms to school. The uniform is a pair of pants, khaki or black, and a white polo shirt bearing the school’s name.

It’s all very fast food-ish, which, given the employment opportunities for working class kids in America, might not be a bad idea. Slide ‘em right out of the school uniform and into the Wendy’s uniform. The school district calls it “spirit wear,” because, given an array of name choices, a school district invariably picks the worst. This is why your town’s junior high school is named after a slave-owning state representative who died in 1843.

It was inevitable that, presented with a uniform, the kids would immediately start trying to tunnel under the wire. Boys let the crisp khakis sag. Girls bought the shirts a size too small. Pentagram necklaces. Boys who had no other way to show their family’s affluence went out and bought $400 sneakers. Girls, forced into the dull plumage of the sparrow, wore their eye makeup in the colors of the peacock’s tail. Shirts were untucked.

Chaos reigned.

It still does, too. The kids, young, carefree, cunning and magnificently disrespectful, are as hard to herd as cats, and much more inspiring to watch.

Parents, some of whom are no doubt busily hiding pictures of themselves at 13, are outraged.

It is the season of Neil.

My old vice principal, Neil, owned a house in our pleasant suburb. He had a wife who no doubt felt passion for him in their time alone together. He was a man complete. He was also an educated man, a man with two degrees in education. He was a smart man, a hardworking man. Alone and unaided, he had climbed from the cramped, smoky hell of the teachers lounge into the private office with “Vice Principal” on the door in letters of real golden-colored paint.

And yet, despite Neil’s achievements in the areas of wife-catching, mortgage-qualifying, education and bureaucracy-navigating, what was his life, really?

Well, entirely too much of it was devoted to sideburn and T-shirt policing.

“Mr. Dion,” he would say to me as I swaggered down the hall in hairy glory. “Sideburns aren’t supposed to be below your earlobes. Make sure you trim those tonight.”

You can favor letting the kids express themselves through clothing choices, or you can insist that their chosen style of dress is thuggy and oversexualized. I won’t argue either way.

What I will tell you is that every rule book creates a Neil, and while your kid may only be in junior high school for a few years, Neil is stuck there for decades, policing, enforcing, informing, punishing.

The dress code may indeed be good for your kids, but I can guarantee you it’s not good for Neil, who either doesn’t like that part of his job, which is bad, or he does, which is worse.