Schools spend $1.1 million to upgrade sports fields for girls

Prince George’s education officials stress compliance with Title IX law after 2006 report showed disparities between boys and girls facilities

Since then, 17 of the county’s 22 softball fields have received a facelift. Outfield fences, protective capping for fences, bleachers, scoreboards, top soil, equipment sheds, warning tracks and dugouts were renovated and sometimes replaced at high school fields, following guidelines of a September 2006 agreement with the National Women’s Law Center (NWLC). NWLC leaders approached Prince George’s school officials about the poor condition of the softball fields, drawing public attention to the problem. Since then, the school system has worked closely with NWLC to bring softball fields up to par and comply with Title IX requirements.

Title IX is the 1972 federal law prohibiting gender discrimination in academics and athletics.

Prince George’s school board members said the county’s Title IX issues would continue to be addressed after years of neglect under previous school boards. Under the agreement reached with the NWLC, the school system is required to submit a detailed Title IX report annually until 2010, and continue to comply with the law afterward.

‘‘People weren’t seeing gender equity as a high priority,” said school board member Heather Iliff (Dist. 2) of College Park.

Higgins Harris said this year’s focus would be balancing the number of boys and girls playing sports in Prince George’s. The law does not require an equal number of boys and girls in sports, but promotion of girls’ sports is required. Higgins Harris said school administrators would instruct counselors and pupil personnel workers to inform girls of upcoming tryouts and post sports opportunities on the county schools’ Web site and the county’s television channel. The system-wide report card would include a line informing students and parents of upcoming sports tryouts, and athletes from local colleges and universities would be invited to promote high school sports.

‘‘The primary focus is to ensure we have proportionality,” Higgins Harris said. ‘‘We’re looking at more explicit ways to promote [girls sports] ... and we want students to be able to see student athletes playing sports they never considered for themselves.”

Forty-nine percent of Prince George’s County’s 40,229 high school students are female, but females made up 40 percent of athletes during the 2006-07 school year. In the fall, when volleyball, soccer, golf and cross country are available for girls, 32 percent of the county’s athletes were female. In the winter, when basketball, wrestling, indoor track and swimming are in season, 41 percent of athletes were female. Thanks to softball participation, springtime proportions were more equal, with females accounting for 51 percent of athletes. Other spring sports for girls are tennis and outdoor track.

Nena Chaudhry, senior counsel at NWLC, said her organization has closely tracked the county’s Title IX progress, but said school officials should bolster participation in girls’ junior varsity sports.

‘‘It’s sort of a chicken-and-egg thing, and you have to have the opportunity for girls to participate at the JV level,” Chaudhry said. ‘‘But they made the improvements they promised to make.”

Some school board members said promoting girls sports might not be the answer to maintaining an equal number of boys and girls involved in sports.

‘‘I think girls need a wider range of choices,” Iliff said, suggesting officials examine figure skating, gymnastics and dance as possible high school sports.

Higgins Harris said that even if the county was able to bring more sports options to schools, female participation in those sports wouldn’t count toward the Title IX numbers until the sport was made official by the Maryland State Department of Education. For example, MSDE does not classify cheerleading as a sport, so cheerleaders are not included in sport participation statistics for schools across the state.

E-mail Dennis Carter at dcarter@gazette.net.