(This week’s civic education and engagement column from Danville’s The Republican newspaper.)
Your local high school’s athletic facilities are probably pretty impressive. So much so that they’re often a source of criticism, especially from older residents. “We didn’t need all those facilities or fancy scoreboards in my day!” “They must have twice as many fields and facilities as they did when I went to school!!” “Those egomaniacs on the school board just want to be like Carmel!”
There are two primary reasons those athletic facilities are more impressive than what you remember from your days as a student. First, athletic facilities at Hendricks County schools are a lot larger than they used to be because the schools serve a lot more students than they did a decade or five ago. Sure, you have fun memories of the old football field, but your school is now twice as big as it was then.
The second reason involves a Terre Haute native named Birch Bayh, who served three terms as one of Indiana’s U.S. Senators. History remembers him as the only non-Founding Father to have written more than one Constitutional amendment (25th and 26th), but some local school taxpayers may be tempted to curse a different part of his legacy: Title IX, which became federal law in 1972.
Title IX addressed many forms of discrimination, but today we’re concerned with one part of its legacy: public school athletics and athletic facilities. Every public school district is subject to the provisions of Title IX. When it comes to athletic programs, Title IX requires those districts to provide equal opportunities for both boys and girls to participate. In simple terms, Title IX doubled the need for athletic facilities by effectively doubling the number of eligible athletes and teams (even though it took years for many schools to get there).
What exactly does “equal opportunities” mean in the law’s eyes? First, there has to be an equal number of chances to play on a team. You can’t have ten boys’ teams and only two for girls. Athletic gear and equipment must be of comparable quality. If boys’ basketball gets custom home and away jerseys, you can’t just hand the girls’ team matching t-shirts. Playing and practice time better be equal, too. The old concept of letting boys’ basketball play home games on Fridays and Saturdays and relegating the girls to Mondays and Tuesdays is no longer legal. Same thing applies to practices. Nor should there be disparities in the tiny stipends teachers and “lay” (anyone whose primary job isn’t in the classroom) coaches receive for their hundreds of hours of work.
Ask women of my generation who were student athletes if their teammates were treated like second-class citizens, and nearly all will be able to tell you stories, many heartbreaking. Sadly, as is so often the case, real progress didn’t come until some students turned to the courts for relief.
Title IX meant that most schools needed to field nearly twice as many teams in facilities that weren’t built for the level of activity we see today. When you see local schools upgrading athletic facilities, it’s less about trying to waste taxpayer money to one-up the next town and more about simply trying to accommodate all the teams and athletes under the law’s provisions.
If it seems schools have expensive taste in what they choose for their facilities, you may not realize that what’s more expensive upfront usually turns out to be a better long-term value for the taxpayer’s dollar. Artificial turf is a great example. When we built the current Plainfield High School, the cost of an artificial turf football field was about half a million dollars. That’s a tough number for taxpayers to swallow. But when you compare the maintenance costs of a traditional grass field over a decade with those of artificial turf, there’s no contest. Artificial turf is far cheaper over the long term.
But cost wasn’t what convinced us to choose it. What ultimately convinced us was data another central Indiana athletic director shared with us. After his school switched to artificial turf, the number of season-ending injuries they experienced dropped dramatically. If you have a hard time putting a price tag on that, imagine it was your child or grandchild who didn’t get hurt.