By Vernon Robison
Sports fans in the Clark County School District (CCSD) will now have yet another girls’ sport to look forward to very soon. Last week, district officials announced that they would be adding girls’ flag football to the CCSD sports lineup. The new sport will reportedly be available at 37 CCSD high schools in the upcoming school year.
Why, you may ask, is there this sudden interest in a new girls’ football program? Has there actually been a high demand for this sport? Are there really high school girls lining up, petitioning the district to be able to play football? Well, not exactly.
Actually, in adding this new athletics program, the CCSD is merely responding to a legal complaint made back in 2010 by the National Women’s Law Center in Washington DC. You see, federal law (Title IX) requires that equal opportunities be provided for both men and women in education and in athletics. Come to find out, there is apparently an alarming shortage of CCSD female students involved in athletics. The gap between males and females playing sports is not supposed to exceed 5% in the district. But the CCSD shows about 10-12 percent more male athletes than females.
Of course, the logical conclusion a rational person might draw is that girls in the CCSD may have other interests which draw them away from competitive sports. For example, perhaps girls prefer involvement in the arts: drama, ceramics, painting, music, forensics, foods, etc. Another sensible explanation could be that many athletically-inclined girls are gravitating towards activities like cheerleading or dance. Unfortunately, the Title IX definition of a “sport” does not include these types of activities. Only female involvement in competitive sports will do. So cheerleaders and dancers don’t count for Title IX compliance.
Whether girls actually want to play competitive sports is not a factor to Title IX and the National Women’s Law Center. Instead, the lawyers insist that the female deficit in CCSD sports involvement is occuring only because there are not enough athletic options open to girls. Adding yet another sport for girls only; say…..flag football; is just what the doctor ordered to solve this problem, they say. Thus, under the threat of significant legal action, the district is acquiescing and forming this new program out of whole cloth.
Of course, such a solution doesn’t come without a cost. After all, you can’t just provide a throw-away, low budget girls’ program and still be fair to the girls. Rest assured, the district will be allowed to spare no expense in this compliance measure. How much will it cost? Well, if you factor in hiring coaches, paying for uniforms and equipment, paying the cost of transportation to games and compensating referrees and officials, the cost is expected to be more than $225,000!
But wait a minute! Isn’t the CCSD currently experiencing an acute budget crisis? That’s what they keep saying. Over the past year or so, the district has had to trim back about a thousand teacher positions from its rolls. And there is now talk that it may have to chop another thousand next year if the state budget doesn’t somehow offer more revenue to education. You can’t make those kinds of cuts without having a negative effect on academics. And, in the end, that effect really boils down to fewer classes available at the schools.
On the one hand, fewer classes means larger class sizes. In the core subjects, where every student must attend, class sizes are exploding. Where a large English class used to be 25-30 students, now it might be as much as 35-40. While teachers will make a valiant effort (as they always do) to make the best of this situation, there is only so much they can do. Quality in education will unavoidably suffer. Fortunately, it will suffer equally for both boys and girls. Thank heavens the district will be compliant with Title IX in this matter, at least!
Fewer teachers and fewer classes also means that programs have to be slashed. There might be fewer Advanced Placement and honors classes available for the top academic tiers. There may be less remedial opportunities for the bottom performers of each class.
As usual, though, it will likely be the electives that receive the greatest impact. There will be fewer music, drama, arts, foods, industrial arts and other elective options. Just here locally, the Moapa Valley High School has, in recent years, had to do away with its Choral Music program. In addition, the MVHS orchestra and band programs, while still in operation, have taken a hit in teaching staff. The visual arts department is also understaffed. The MVHS administration has managed to spare the school’s excellent foods program, but only just barely and only through some very creative staffing adjustments.
It is perhaps interesting that these creative arts elective programs have been particularly popular among the school’s female population. This is especially true of the wholly scrapped choral program which was always predominantly female in its enrollment. It is curious that none of these affects really registered anywhere in this all consuming quest by National Women’s Law Center for athletic equity among the sexes.
With the CCSD so often inclined to resort to deep cuts in solving its budgetary woes; it is interesting that it should suddenly choose to solve this Title IX compliance problem by throwing in $225,000 in additional spending and a wholly new created program. Since the district is in such a cutting mode for everything else, wouldn’t it be more consistent to bring parity to the female athletes through making cuts as well? For example, rather than add nearly a quarter million dollars to girls’ sports why not just subtract it off of boys’ sports programs instead? Then the school athletic programs throughout the district would be sinking into an equilibrium just like all of the other academic programs are.
For that matter, why stop there? Why not whittle down both girls and boys athletics budgets to the barest minimum. Zero is a nice round and fair number. Cutting both male and female athletic budgets with equal severity; not favoring one over the other; would surely meet the Title IX requirement. After all, if there are no CCSD funded extra-curricular athletic programs for boys you can’t expect any for girls either. Plus, redirecting all that athletic funding would do a great deal to salvage the struggling academic curriculum, right?
OK, I recognize that, to many, doing away with high school sports programs is an absolutely heresy. I know that the very concept of decimating the athletic budget to save academics would be a wildly unpopular notion in this community and in others. We just have to have our Pirate sports and I am with you all on that. Please don’t go out and egg the windows of the Progress office this weekend. I will, however, welcome your letters of intense opposition to my crazy notions.
But, all joking aside, isn’t there something wrong with the CCSD spending more than $7 million of its budget on high school athletics; plus, now, another $225,000 for this new flag football program; all while not having enough money to keep teachers in the classrooms? Since when has athletics taken a higher priority than educating kids in core academics?
Yes, I fully agree that there is much that students learn from athletic endeavors. But how have we gotten to such a point where; even as we are cutting teachers, raising class sizes and slashing academic programs; we are funding a new flag football program for girls who never asked for it; just to appease a bunch of Washington lawyers? Is this actually how far public education has sunk? If so, we really need to review our core priorities and fundamental purposes of devoting public funds to education.
The basic function of public education ought to be preparing students to best compete in the worldwide marketplace of life and to provide them opportunities to become well-rounded individuals. In our difficult economic times, everything should be measured carefully against this. So the real question in this case is: How does a new girls’ flag football program; and, by extension, any other tail-wagging-the-dog athletic program or activity; really measure up against that basic academic goal?
