The Wake County school system is asking eighth-grade students to take an online survey on what sports they're interested in and what they might want the district to begin offering in the future.
The survey is part of an agreement that Wake reached in June with the U.S. Department of Education's Office for Civil Rights to settle a complaint alleging Title IX discrimination against female student-athletes.
Wake agreed to survey eighth-grade students to gauge their interest in sports that are not now offered by the district. Based on the results, Wake will look to add athletic opportunities at the high schools for the 2013-14 school year.
The school district says the survey will only take five minutes and the responses will be confidential. You don't need to be a current participant in athletics to respond.
Wake was initially supposed to do the survey by Dec. 1. But it looks like they've got until Dec. 21 now.
In addition to taking the survey, students can download a "Request New High School Sports or Levels of Sports Form" that can be sent to the district.
Wake has denied discriminating against female athletes. But OCR charged that its investigation "revealed large disparities between the district-wide enrollment of female students and their participation in interscholastic athletics."
OCR also said that Wake and three other school districts that settled Title IX complaints "had not conducted recent district-wide assessments of student athletic interest."
Comments
a modest proposal
Fri, 11/30/2012 - 18:53 — apexdad2100if we eliminated football, all the disparities would probably go away, and we'd save tons of money, and a few kids' lives. maybe this is not feasible because people love their football, but that's the choice we're making.
as to whether the feds should be involved, that's a separate question. North Carolina should be at least as committed, if not more, to fair treatment.
Well, I agree that federal
Fri, 11/30/2012 - 14:05 — mnordbergWell, I agree that federal involvement in K-12 is stupid, having to do a survey on survey monkey isn't exactly a lot of money. A high school student could write the questions and in an hour or two be done with putting the survey on the web site. Then a few hours of analyzing the data. Any good organization should have procedures in place to be able to collect feedback such as through surveys for a lot of things such as interaction with their "customers".
Pfft...
Fri, 11/30/2012 - 10:07 — Bob_SconceOf course there's a wide disparity between women's enrollment and participation in sports. High school girls don't have the same interest in playing sports as high school boys do.
It's perfectly fine to have a big discrepency as long as there aren't girls who really want to play a sport, but are being shut out. And, that's the purpose of this survey -- to show that girls aren't being denied athletic opportunities.
THIS is an example of why the Federal Government should not be involved in K-12 education -- forcing Wake County to waste money on this sort of thing when there's a budget crunch.