{
  "id": "1999-may-title-ix-undermined",
  "slug": "1999-may-title-ix-undermined",
  "url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-may-title-ix-undermined.html",
  "year": 1999,
  "month": "May",
  "monthNum": 5,
  "headline": "Title IX undermined",
  "kicker": "HIGH SCHOOL GENDER DISCRIMINATION",
  "author_name": "Jim Hopkins",
  "author_title": "Reporter",
  "affiliation": "The Courier-Journal",
  "summary": "A six-month data analysis by The Courier-Journal exposed widespread gender discrimination in Kentucky and Indiana high school sports, forcing new state compliance measures.",
  "keywords": [
    "Title IX",
    "gender discrimination",
    "high school sports"
  ],
  "topics": [
    "Education",
    "Investigative Methods",
    "Demographics & Census"
  ],
  "technologies": [
    "Paradox",
    "Excel"
  ],
  "full_text": "In Fourmile, on the western edge of Appalachian Kentucky, softball coach Rick Nelson bristled at the way some high school girls were treated by the Bell County School District. At the girls' softball field, about half the lights didn't work. Dugouts were little more than tin roofs propped up by two-by-fours. The restrooms were crowded, dirty and didn't always work. Seven miles down the road the boys' baseball team had manicured fields that were amply lit and featured cinder-block dugouts painted with the Bobcats' logo. Nelson told The Courier-Journal that he believed the county school district was in violation of Title IX, part of a 1972 federal law that requires schools to provide comparable athletic programs for girls and boys. That interview prompted a team of Courier-Journal reporters to conduct a six-month computer-assisted examination of athletic programs at hundreds of public high schools in Kentucky and Southern Indiana. Our conclusion in February 1998: There was rampant gender discrimination in equipment, practice times, facilities, budgets and the number of teams offered. The Courier-Journal's disclosures brought immediate results. The Kentucky Board of Education now requires all high schools to certify annually that they're complying with Title IX. For the first time, the state sponsored two Title IX training sessions for school officials. And in February of this year, after the newspaper published a follow-up report showing continued inequities, education board members accused the Kentucky High School Athletics Association of not working hard enough to deal with the problem. The newspaper's findings came after lots of traditional shoe-leather journalism mixed with newer computer-assisted reporting and analysis techniques. Under open-records laws, we mailed requests to each of the 255 Kentucky and Southern Indiana high schools that have interscholastic sports. We asked for sports participation numbers by gender, for spending on boys' and girls' sports, for a gender breakdown on athletic directors and coaches and other information. We also obtained electronic copies of schedules for more than 5,000 boys' and girls' basketball games for the 1997-98 season. Using Paradox and Excel, we created dozens of databases to track the following: spending, growth in boys' teams versus girls' teams and trends in the hiring of women. We showed, for example, that: • Although boys comprised about 50 percent of school enrollment in Kentucky's public high schools, they held 62 percent of all the team positions. • Men held virtually all the coaching slots in major boys' sports and the majority of slots in girls' softball, basketball and soccer. • Nearly 40 percent of boys' basketball games were played during \"prime time\" – Friday nights, when audiences are especially large. Less than 13 percent of girls' games were scheduled during that time slot. The biggest obstacles we faced were in gathering data. Because there was no central repository for the records we needed, the lead reporter had to write individual records requests to each school. When school officials didn't respond, we placed follow-up phone calls and made additional written requests. We were also hampered by the fact that school officials generally provided raw data, which meant sorting through copies of budgets and hiring schedules to learn, for example, how much was spent on travel for a football team or how many women were in coaching positions. Finally, to keep the story focused on the people most affected – the students – we crisscrossed the state to interview parents, team members and school officials, then supplemented that reporting by talking with experts on a national level. Going beyond the data led us to people like Jerry Owens, principal at Owen County High. \"There is probably not a high school in the state that isn't violating the law,\" he said. \"The good ol' boy network is very much in place.\"",
  "provenance": {
    "extracted_by": "pre-v2",
    "extracted_at": "",
    "verified": true
  },
  "similar": [
    {
      "slug": "1997-march-handout-of-the-month",
      "score": 0.286
    },
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  "html_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-may-title-ix-undermined.html",
  "json_url": "https://dwillis.github.io/uplink/article/1999-may-title-ix-undermined.json"
}