Sex-Bias Remedies Upheld

...The U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously last month that Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 is not the exclusive means for suing districts over sex bias.

The justices ruled that the 1972 statute called Title IX does not bar victims of sex discrimination in schools from pursuing claims under the federal statute known as Section 1983 - a Reconstruction-era law that allows plaintiffs to sue any individual who violates their civil rights. Analysts believe the statute may offer wider protections than Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in federally financed schools and colleges.

"We conclude that Title IX was not meant to be an exclusive mechanism for addressing gender discrimination in schools, or as a substitute for Section 1983 suits as a means of enforcing constitutional rights," Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote for the court on Jan. 21 in Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee (Case No. 07-1125).

During the 2000–2001 school year, the daughter of petitioners Lisa and Robert Fitzgerald was a kindergarten student in the Barnstable, Massachusetts, school system, and rode the bus to school each morning. One day she told her parents that, whenever she wore a dress, a third-grade boy on the school bus would bully her into lifting her skirt.

Lisa Fitzgerald immediately called the school principal, Frederick Scully, who arranged a meeting later that day with the Fitzgeralds, their daughter, and another school official, Lynda Day. Scully and Day then questioned the alleged bully, who denied the allegations. Day also interviewed the bus driver and several students who rode the bus. She concluded that she could not corroborate the girl’s version of the events.

The Fitzgeralds’ daughter then provided new details ofthe alleged abuse to her parents, who relayed them toScully. Specifically, she told her parents that in additionto bullying her into raising her skirt, the boy coerced herinto pulling down her underpants and spreading her legs. Scully scheduled a second meeting with the Fitzgeralds to discuss the additional details and again questioned theboy and other students.

Meanwhile, the local police department conducted anindependent investigation and concluded there was insufficient evidence to bring criminal charges against the boy. Based partly on the police investigation and partly on the school’s own investigation, Scully similarly concluded there was insufficient evidence to warrant discipline.

Scully did propose remedial measures to the Fitzgeralds. He suggested transferring their daughter to a different bus or leaving rows of empty seats between the kindergarteners and older students on the original bus. The Fitzgeralds felt that these proposals punished their daughter instead of the boy and countered with alternative proposals. They suggested transferring the boy to a different bus or placing a monitor on the original bus. The Barnstable school system’s superintendent, Russell Dever,did not act on these proposals.

The Fitzgeralds began driving their daughter to schoolto avoid further bullying on the bus, but she continued to report unsettling incidents at school. The Fitzgeralds reported each incident to Scully. The Fitzgeralds’ daughter had an unusual number of absences during the remainder of the school year.

Parents’ Suit Offers Test of Title IX for Justices

This from the New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The parents of a girl who said she had been molested on a school bus seemed poised to win what may turn out to be an empty victory, judging from the justices’ questions on Tuesday at the Supreme Court.

The case was filed in 2002 after the girl, a kindergarten student in Hyannis, Mass., told her parents she was being sexually harassed by an 8-year-old boy every time she wore a dress or skirt to school. Two or three times a week, the girl said, the boy would force her to lift her skirt and pull down her underwear, provoking mocking laughter from the other students on the bus.

Her parents were dissatisfied with the school’s response, which included an inconclusive investigation and the offer to transfer their daughter to another bus. The school took no action against the boy, who denied the girl’s account, and it refused to place an adult monitor on the bus.

The parents sued under two federal statutes, and the argument on Tuesday concerned how those statutes interact.

The federal appeals court in Boston last year ruled that the parents could not win their claim under the federal law known as Title IX, which bars sex discrimination in schools that receive federal money, because they could not prove that the school district had acted with deliberate indifference to the harassment...

The question before the court in the case, Fitzgerald v. Barnstable School Committee, No. 07-1125, was whether the parents might also invoke a broader federal civil rights law known as Section 1983.

Several justices appeared ready to accept that Title IX, enacted in 1972, was not meant to limit the ability to sue under Section 1983, enacted a century earlier. But, in this case at least, they also seemed to think that allowing a claim under the earlier law would make no difference.

“In the civil rights area, there are a lot of overlapping statutes,” Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said. “Yes, you have two claims. But if you lose under IX, you are going to lose under 1983 as well.”

This from Mark Walsh at the School Law Blog: Justices Uncharacteristically Reticent in Title IX Arguments

A New Frontier for Title IX: Science

This from the New York Times; Graphic by Victor Koen:

Until recently, the impact of Title IX, the law forbidding sexual discrimination in education, has been limited mostly to sports. But now, under pressure from Congress, some federal agencies have quietly picked a new target: science.

The National Science Foundation, NASA and the Department of Energy have set up programs to look for sexual discrimination at universities receiving federal grants. Investigators have been taking inventories of lab space and interviewing faculty members and students in physics and engineering departments at schools like Columbia, the University of Wisconsin, M.I.T. and the University of Maryland.

So far, these Title IX compliance reviews haven’t had much visible impact on campuses beyond inspiring a few complaints from faculty members. (The journal Science quoted Amber Miller, a physicist at Columbia, as calling her interview “a complete waste of time.”) But some critics fear that the process could lead to a quota system that could seriously hurt scientific research and do more harm than good for women...

Is Title IX Sidelining the Boys?

While federal law made sports more accessible to women, critics charge it works against male athletes.

In 1972, Title IX of the Education Amendments was made law. It requires that "no person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance,” giving equal opportunity to women in school activities for the first time.

But while Title IX opened doors for women in all arenas of the educational system, it was taken most literally when applied to athletics programs. Requiring that schools have an equal number of male and female players, whatever the proportion of interest, forced some schools to cut back on male athletics programs, like at James Madison University in Harrisonburg, Va., which is being added to a suit against the U.S. Department of Education by Equity in Athletics Inc., after the university announced it will permanently cut 10 men's teams to comply with anti-sex-discrimination laws.

This from Newsweek.

Huge change for girls sports

This from the Detroit News:

High Court decision means thousands of Michigan high school athletes

will juggle schedules.

Decades of discrimination against girl athletes in Michigan high schools came to an end Monday when the U.S. Supreme Court closed the final door on a state association that had fought to maintain the status quo.

A pair of Grand Rapids moms, Diane Madsen and Jay Roberts-Eveland, who began questioning a decade ago why their daughters were treated differently from boy athletes, wound up changing the face of Michigan high school sports forever.

Beginning in September, seasons will switch for nearly 56,000 girls and 16,000 boys -- along with thousands of officials and coaches and hundreds of school districts.

"I feel as though the weight of the world has been lifted off my shoulders," Madsen said of the ruling. "This shows me that there are people of goodwill out there, who recognize discrimination when they see it, and want to change it.

"(The suit) really was about far more than just playing seasons. It was about basic fairness and equity and giving girls the same opportunities that boys have always had in this state."
The seasons that will be affected include girls basketball and volleyball, and boys and girls tennis and golf.