Title IX complaint filed against Clark County School District

By Erin Dostal

Published Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010 | 10:31 a.m.

Updated Wednesday, Nov. 10, 2010 | 5:20 p.m.

The National Women's Law Center in Washington, D.C., has filed a complaint against the Clark County School District, saying its fails to offer equal opportunities for female athletes.

The center said Wednesday that data from 2006 indicate the district violated Title IX, the federal law prohibiting gender discrimination in federally funded education programs. Eleven other school districts across the U.S. also had complaints filed against them.

In those 12 districts, the percentage of girls playing sports was lower than that in the student body. In Clark County, the gap was 10.1 percentage points, the law center said. Sixteen of Clark County’s 31 high schools had participation gaps of more than 10 percent, the complaint said.

Across all of the 12 districts, the gaps ranged from 8 to 33 percentage points.

The school district’s participation gap has increased from 8.6 percentage points in 2004 to 10.1 percentage points in 2006 – indicating that the district is not adding opportunities for girls to participate in sports, the complaint said.

The gaps are often linked to the availability of some sports only to boys, but not to girls, the complaint said, listing “skiing” as an example.

Starla Goedeke, a spokeswoman for the Clark County School District, said the district has no comment on the complaint because it is still going through the U.S. Department of Education’s Office For Civil Rights, where all complaints were filed.

In order for schools to comply with Title IX, they must meet one of three criteria, according to a document on the National Women’s Law Center’s website. First, the percentage of girls at a school must equal the percentage of female athletes. Second, the school can have a history of expanding opportunities for the underrepresented gender – which it says is usually girls. And third, the school can show it is “effectively meeting its female students' interest and abilities to participate in sports.”

The Clark County School District failed on all three counts, prompting the complaint, said Neena Chaudhry, senior counsel for the National Women’s Law Center.

Chaudhry said Title IX is important because participation in athletics affects other aspects of high school students’ lives. Girls, she said, deserve opportunities as much as boys.

“In particular, for girls, with the obesity crisis, and girls being less physically active, it’s really important to provide them opportunities in sports,” she said.

Participation in high school sports has also been linked to lower dropout rates and lower teen pregnancy rates, she said.

Chaudhry said she wasn’t surprised by the group’s findings because she hears complaints about Title IX violations every day.

“It’s sad that we still have so far to go,” she said, saying that the findings, while not surprising, were unsettling. “There has been progress, and there will continue to be. We really want schools to step up and do the right thing.”

The other school districts involved are Chicago; Columbus, Ohio; Deer Valley (Ariz.); Henry County, Ga.; Houston; Irvine, Calif.; New York City; Oldham County, Ky.; Sioux Falls, S.D.; Wake County, N.C.; and Worcester, Mass.