RE 3: Equity in high school sports

From: Dempsey or Brown (dempsy@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Tue Oct 05 1999 - 14:10:54 EDT


Lesemann,

You wrote that a good place to start: "would be to ask the
school for a list of the appropriation of funds.." Perhaps
you can save some time by establishing, to a certainty, how
many of which gender are participating in which sports. It
is useful if this participation profile is established
before asking about the money. The position taken by OCR
makes the budgets less helpful than the actual
participation numbers and the relationship of those numbers
to the unmet interest on the part of the underrepresented
gender.

Most places I study have established the "reality"
that football needs more money because they are more
expensive. Attacking that logic, and the logic-tight brains
that create and maintain it is very challenging. However
the numbers that make the budget demand excessive for
football are more difficult to explain if the discussion
proceeds on a basis of unmet need and you have the
information to establish that particular failure to comply
since girls are cut and the numbers are available. If there
are no cuts in football and cuts in field hockey and if the
numbers of girls participating in athletics are
substantially disproportionate to their numbers in the
student body, your argument will be more fundamentally
structured. By the way, go ahead and ask for the list. You
will need it anyway from what you have said.

Herb Dempsey
dempsy@ix.netcom.com



This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue Jan 04 2000 - 12:33:27 EST