I was reading an article the other day about educational statistics, and it gave me an idea for a story. But since I'm currently blocked and haven't even found time to work on my existing stories I don't need any more. So anyone who wants to can run with this:

Our story takes place in a fairly well-off suburban community. At a school committee meeting, Mrs. Smith an influential parent who always pushes for the best possible education for her daughters, gives a presentation to the board about a new study that was done that showed that girls do better academically when segregated from the boys. So she proposes that the district experiment with this by transferring all the boys from Southside Middle School (which just happens to be where the Smith girls attend) to Eastside Middle School, and sending all the girls from Eastside to Southside. And if the results show that the students do better this way, they should extend the situation so that all the schools in the district become single-sex. Mrs. Smith has a bunch of charts and graphs and spreadsheets that show that this won't cost that much more, since so few of the students take schoolbuses, and she does a pretty good job railroading her proposal through the committee.

But then an equally overinvolved influential mother, Mrs. Jones, who somehow had been tipped off about Mrs. Smith's proposal, gets up and gives her own presentation about the part of that study Mrs. Smith left out. They also found that boys did better academically when in a coeducational environment. Mrs. Jones doesn't want her sons' education suffering, so she rallies support against the same-sex schools experiment.

The chairman of the board knows that he can't afford to make an enemy of either of these women, but also knows that it's impossible to satisfy both of them, so he opens the discussion to see if anyone has a solution for how they can have classes for girls with only girls while simultaneously having girls in the classes with the boys.

Mr. Wiseacre, a childless curmudgeon who only got on the board by being related to someone important, decides to play devil's advocate and suggests that the Solomonic solution would obviously be that they'd send all the girls to Southside and all the boys to Eastside, but then make some of the Eastside boys dress up and act like girls. He presents it as a joke, but the chairman is desperate and doesn't get deadpan humor anyway, besides not wanting to offend the heir to the Wiseacre fortune. So he starts discussing the proposal as something serious, and the rest of the board go along with it.

They end up quibbling over the details, like what proportion of boys would have to be girls, would it have to be half, or could it be as low as a quarter. And they argued over who would get to pick the boys to be girls, whether it would be acceptable to just pick the smaller ones or if it should be more random like a lottery, or if they could just ask for volunteers, perhaps in exchange for some kind of reward. And they started talking about setting a dress code for the boy girls that forced them to wear skirts and whether that would be fair if they let the girl girls in Southside still wear pants.

All the while no one had the guts to point out to the naked emperor that this was a stupid idea, and instead they moved forward with it.

So at the start of the next school year, Southside Middle School became a place where one in three students attended in a skirt, blouse and knee socks, despite the student body being 100% biologically male.

The story would deal with the stress or ridiculousness of the situation from the point of view of one of the boys picked to be a girl, or maybe of his/her parents trying to get the stupid rule overturned. I'm undecided on whether I'd end up having the kid enjoying the process, but since I'm not making the story I don't have to make that decision.