Thursday, April 23, 1998 | 10:19 a.m.
Despite a quiet movement nationwide to keep students at school for today's Take Our Daughters to Work Day, the Clark County School District still strongly supports the program.
"Our students come back with a renewed understanding of why school is important and a better feeling of what it is that their parents and/or relatives do," said Kathleen Frosini, one organizer of the day in Clark County. "We haven't had any negative repercussions."
Clark County school officials don't track how many students participate in the event. But some students, including some boys, from most of the district's 219 schools planned to join their parents at work for the sixth annual event, designed to nurture girls' confidence and ambitions.
However, some schools around the country -- including girls' schools -- are quietly opting out of the event, fed up with lost academic time and logistical headaches. Educators complain that some students miss school just to sit around a parent's office.
In Runnells, Iowa, students today are in classes, not work places. The district held the day in February -- on a school holiday.
"We think the event is worthwhile," superintendent Joseph Drips of the Southeast Polk district said. "But we only have 180 days in which to educate our young people. Our cause is worthy, too."
In Texas, school officials are allowing all schools to reschedule the day. Other schools nationwide are limiting participation by grade or actively urging parents to skip the day altogether.
"We're encouraging people not to take part in it," said Jane O'Connell, spokeswoman for New York City's Convent of the Sacred Heart girls' school, which for the first time sent a letter to parents asking them to support its decision "not to observe the program in a way that requires absences from classes."
A number of public schools also are dropping out of the event. Educators are quick to praise the day's intentions, but they say school work comes first.
"When we take children out of school, we're saying the school shouldn't be the No. 1 priority," says Faye Davis, principal of Delaware Elementary, which is part of the Southeast Polk district, southeast of Des Moines.
Officials at the Ms. Foundation, creators of the day's theme, aren't pleased. "Is this a disconnect or what?" asked the foundation's president Marie Wilson.
Take Our Daughters to Work Day is held on a school day intentionally, Wilson said. School follow-up is crucial, she said.
"When a girl comes back from a work site and says, 'I want to be a physicist,' we want her to ask, 'What do I have to study?' " Wilson said.
Tressa Kezar, a high school junior in Dripping Springs, Texas, said her district's decision to reschedule the day to July 15 takes the sparkle out of the event.
Getting excused from school to go to her mom's or dad's work -- on a day when millions of other girls do it too -- seems important and exciting, she said. But now that the day will be in summer, the 17-year-old said she may just sleep late that morning.
"It's telling girls, 'You can do it on your own time,' " she said. "It sounds to me as if they're saying it's not important."
Tressa's mother, Sylva Kezar, vice president of the local PTA and a former teacher, said she and other parents can see both sides.
Holding the day in summer, without all the national hoopla, makes it "easier for parents to let it slip their minds," she said. "On the other hand, our kids have so many distractions."
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