[EDEQUITY] Alternative Solution

From: Dempsey or Brown (dempsy@ix.netcom.com)
Date: Wed Nov 22 2000 - 12:49:39 EST


Susan McKevitt suggested that the boys in Florida, "Bias Case Delayed",
could go to the public park and the girls stay on-campus. I have made
that suggestion many times and as yet have no takers. In another
variation I suggest the mound on the campus baseball field be leveled
and the baselines re-measured and it become a softball venue in every
other year for the next 100 years. Again, no takers. One problem
appears to be fairly basic and the motive is profit. When the off-site
field is developed it is built as a multi-purpose facility. Then there
are four mountings for the pitching rubbers and different sockets at
differing distances for everything from bases to home run fences.
Everyone who plays, pays. Hence the opportunity cost of a single-use
baseball field is never part of the discussion but is a fundamental of
the equation.

In another variation in a case currently before the federal bench the
community college needed a parking lot. Rather than negotiate with
anyone, someone decided to pave the adjacent college softball field and
leave the excellent baseball diamond untouched. The women of the
softball team are now trucked across town to a gritty municipal
multi-use facility where they are expected to compete with everyone from
little kids to old men for their time at the diamond. Did I mention
they now have two problems: they lost both proximity and exclusivity?
Not only has baseball the exclusive use of the campus field but they are
right next to the locker rooms and the gym with its weightroom and only
a short pitch from the enclosed indoor hitting facility.

For those of you who follow this particular discrimination the case
currently filed in the Northern District of Kentucky (Boone County
School District) and the one in the Western District of Washington
(Edmonds Community College) will be worth attention. I am afraid the
delay seems inherent in the court system but I am also hopeful that more
articles like the one in the current issue of Coaching Management will
entice the Office for Civil Rights to make good on their stated position
that they are the agency that enforces Title IX. The article in that
particular national magazine has excellent color pictures which deal
with this softball v. baseball controversy in fields that have been
widely publicized and still exist as models of rampaging discrimination.
 See article without the excellent pictures, though: =
http://www.momentummedia.com/articles/cm/cm0807/equal.htm

Herb Dempsey
dempsy@ix.netcom.com



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