In June this year, the New York Times ran a piece on “Title IX parents”— parents who through the years have filed lawsuits on behalf of their daughters in order to enforce gender parity. The article focused on several mothers who sought redress through the courts.*
But it’s not always mothers who are their daughters’ advocates. There are Title IX dads, too.
In 1996, Ron Randolph took an early Title IX stand. Ron lived in Owasso, Oklahoma, and was a firefighter in nearby Tulsa. He was a single dad, with a son and a daughter. Fifteen-year-old Mimi played softball for Owasso High School.
Mimi’s team played on an old dirt field a few miles from the school, while the boys’ baseball team had a state-of-the-art stadium complete with viewing stands and an electronic scoreboard.
“Our guys’ team has three sets of uniforms, while all of our uniforms — total — are less than they have in one set,” Mimi told a reporter at the time.** The uniforms for her team didn’t even match.
Her dad chimed in: “They played night games on a softball field where 23 of the 37 light bulbs were burned out.”***
When the team went to the state championships for the first time in the school’s history, the school wouldn’t pay for motel stays. The girls had to drive back and forth every day.
A father’s awakening
Ron heard about Title IX at a community seminar offered by Ray Yasser, a law professor at the University of Tulsa and an expert in sports law. That was the light-bulb moment for this dad.
“I’m not a libber by any means,’’ he said. “But if it’s right, it’s right, and if it’s wrong, it’s wrong.”****
Not only was Ron the parent of an athlete, he was taxpayer as well.
“I’ve got a boy and a girl. And if I pay $100 every year to this school in taxes, and $10 of it goes to athletics, I think $5 ought to go to my boy, and $5 ought to go to my girl,” he said. “To me, it’s simple math.”†
At the time, schools in Oklahoma as a whole had about equal numbers of enrolled boys and girls. Yet boys were offered 67 percent of the athletic opportunities, while girls had only 33 percent. And you’re talking about Title IX having been in place for 24 years!
Ron and the other parents asked the Owasso Independent School District to remodel the girls’ softball field. The district declined.
Boy, was that ever a costly decision!
Oops!
The parent group filed their lawsuit, and in May 1997, the district settled. They agreed to be in full compliance with Title IX by 1999. And, as part of the settlement, they had to construct a $275,000 softball facility. Ron laughed at that figure — if they had just remodeled the original field, he believed they could have spent about $35,000.
“Anybody who gets sued now is an idiot,” he said. “Title IX is a fact of life. Parents will work with schools if the schools will work.”††
If only Ron had been right! Here we are 50 years out from the passage of Title IX, and we’re still inching forward one lawsuit at a time. But things might move faster from now on, simply because of the generation of girls who are now grown up.
“We’re now at the point where women who were high school athletes are raising families, and they definitely know their daughters are supposed to have what the men have had all along,” said Sam Schiller (a lawyer in Tennessee who has filed Title IX lawsuits in 30 states and has never lost).†††
“It’s Title IX 2.0.”
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* Bill Pennington, “The Real Enforcers of Gender Equity in Sports: Angry Parents” (June 22, 2022).
** Meg Sommerfield, “Title IX has become a more prominent tool for expanding athletic opportunities for girls,” American Association of School Administrators (undated).
*** Randy Ellis, “Struggles put girls on serve,” The Daily Oklahoman (October 3, 1999), p. 538.
**** David Hill, “A Pitch for Equality,” Education Week (August 1, 1996), p. 8.
† “A Pitch for Equality,” p. 8. (The asterisks were getting out of hand!)
††“Struggles,” p. 546.
†††“The Real Enforcers.”
PHOTO CREDIT: Paul Hellstern, The Daily Oklahoman