U.S. High School Girls Sports and Booster Clubs
Author Details (please list these in the order they should appear in the published article)
Author 1 Name: Donna M. Anderson, Ph.D.
Department: Department of Economics
University/Institution: University of Wisconsin-La Crosse
Town/City: La Crosse
State (US only): Wisconsin
Country: USA
Corresponding author: Donna M. Anderson, Ph.D.
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Acknowledgments (if applicable): N/A
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Structured Abstract: Objectives: This paper explores United States high school booster club activity and its potential effect on gender equity by examining high schools’ booster club models – one all-school, all-sport booster club or a booster club for each sport – and club reporting requirements. Background: The U.S. Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 prohibits schools from discriminating on the basis of sex in any educational program. However, schools can escape compliance by allowing each sport to have its own booster club, a model which heavily favors boys’ sports, coupled with an absence of club reporting requirements to school district officials. Method: All 414 Wisconsin public high schools’ athletic directors were surveyed in September 2015 on booster club activities. Results: A quarter of high schools do not require their booster clubs to report their activities to a school district official, and only 46% have one all-sport booster club. Factors that predict booster club model were identified. Conclusion: Federal laws on gender equity may be undermined by booster clubs. Solutions include requiring the public release of booster club expenditures and an adoption of one all-sport booster club.
Keywords: Gender equity, Title IX, Booster clubs
Article Classification: Original paper
For internal production use only
Running Heads:
U.S. High School Girls Sports and Booster Clubs
Introduction
High school funding by state governments in the United States stands below 2008 levels in thirty-five states. States were forced to make cuts in education since the Great Recession precipitated a collapse in state revenues (Oliff, Mai, & Leachman, 2012). Of these thirty-five states, seventeen have cut per student funding by more than 10 % since late 1997, while three have reduced per student spending by more than 20 % (Oliff, Mai, & Leachman, 2012). Overall, two-thirds of schools have cut funding for athletic programs and 82 % reported experiencing pressures on the athletic budget (Oliff, Mai, & Leachman, 2012). However, responses to the drop in revenues vary by state and school district. Using school district-level data, Chakrabarti and Setren (2011) found that although instructional expenditure was maintained since 2004-05, other categories such as transportation, student activities – including athletics - and utilities suffered.
Despite the cutbacks, athletic participation nationwide has increased in this same period (NCES, 2012), forcing schools to find alternative sources of funding. Many have adopted “pay to play” policies where a family must pay a certain amount to the school for their child to participate. “Pay to play” fees are a flat charge per year or per number of sports; parents often pay additional team fees, as well as other out-of-pocket costs such as equipment and transportation. Of course, the advent of pay to play policies occurred long before the Great Recession (McHugh, 2009), but whereas few schools made use of these policies 20 years ago, 33 states indicated the use of participation fees in 2009 (Howard, 2011). USA Today newspaper found that in 2004, 33 states had districts that utilized pay-to-play (Brady & Giler, 2004), while the National Federation of State High School Associations indicated similar results in a 2009 survey of their members (NFHS, 2009). More recently, a national survey in 2010 by the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association (2010) found about 34 % of schools that responded said students were required to pay an activities fee, and had increased or would be increasing existing fees for the 2010-11 school year. Pierce and Bussell (2011) found similar percentages in their national survey.
Those districts that have not adopted such a policy cite discrimination against those who cannot afford to pay as the reason. Indeed, some states have declared pay to play policies unlawful because they violate the state constitutional right to a free public education, of which extracurricular activities are an integral and necessary part (Pennsylvania School Boards Association, 2010). Unsurprisingly, families are resistant to refusing their son or daughter school sports participation (Bigelow, Moroney, and Hall, 2001), anecdotal evidence that demand is highly inelastic. Past research reveals the increasing emphasis parents place on sports participation for their youth, the rising amount of money devoted to this industry, and possible theories explaining this phenomenon (Bigelow, Moroney, and Hall, 2001). Simply not playing in response to higher costs of participation is the absolute last resort. Thus, high school sports spending is no longer a discretionary line in a family’s budget, but a necessary one, placing an increasing and significant burden on all families, especially those with limited means.
On the other hand, taxpayers are increasingly resistant to higher taxes for schools, particularly for what are considered extracurricular activities such as music and athletic programs (Brady & Giler, 2004), and in light of the 2% reduction in household median income between 2007 and 2010 (U.S. Census Bureau, 2012). In order to avoid raising play to play fees and raising local property taxes, schools have explored other funding sources, including corporate sponsorship and fundraising. Pierce and Bussell (2011) found that over 87 % of schools in their national sample turned to fundraising while 57 % are trying corporate sponsorship to prevent charging participation fees. The vast majority of fundraising is conducted by booster clubs which, for the purposes of this paper, are private, parent-run organizations whose function is to develop support for a student program.
Although booster clubs seem relatively innocuous, in the wrong hands and unchecked, a booster club can exert pressure on parents to contribute their limited time and financial resources, resulting in the same problems as pay t -play (Brady & Giler, 2004), as well as create gender disparities in funding. Pittsburgh Tribune-Live’s reporter Carl Prine went so far as to call booster club spending the “shadow economy of high school sports” in his award-winning investigative series on gender inequality in high school sports (2001). His examination of sports programs at 129 public high schools comprising the Western Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic League (WPIAL) and the Pittsburgh City League details the lack of school district oversight for how booster clubs spend and raise their money. Among his findings was that “booster clubs poured dollars – sometimes illegally – into boys while neglecting girls” (Prine, 2001).
Investigative reporting on booster clubs has also shown that a booster club model in which each sport has its own booster club leads to more inequitable spending (Hoch, 1999; Prine, 2001; Simmons, 2010). Moreover, the Women Sports Foundation (WSF) recommends that each school district establish “an all-inclusive school-wide booster club” in order to manage booster clubs effectively and equitably (WSF, 2008). If each sport is free to raise and spend money, it is more likely that funding for sports less popular in the community from which funds are raised will suffer and create a gender equity issue. Male sports programs typically receive more donor support because they have been around longer and men earn more than women on average in the U.S. (WSF, 2008). Consequently, sports that have traditionally been supported in the community like football and boys basketball are the recipients of the bulk of donations, while less popular sports, that tend to be girls sports, receive a fraction of the donation amount, if anything at all (WSF, 2008). This is in violation of the U.S. law, Title IX of the Education Amendment of 1972 which prohibits discrimination based on sex in education programs and activities that receive federal financial assistance (U.S. Department of Education, 2015). According to the Office for Civil Right (OCR), the Federal government entity charged with enforcing Title IX:
The private funds that are used to support District athletic programs, although neutral in principle, are likely to be subject to the same historical patterns that Title IX was enacted to address. In the experience of OCR, sponsors, as a whole, are more interested and willing to assist boys’ teams than girls’ teams, and male-oriented “booster” activities generate more public interest than girls’ activities. If all benefits are not considered in examining interscholastic athletics, the purpose and effect of the Title IX requirements could be routinely undermined by the provision of unequal benefits through private financial assistance (WSF, 2008).
What further harms the situation is that many people, including high school administrators – athletic directors and school Title IX officers – do not know that booster club expenditures need to be considered when determining a school’s compliance with Title IX. In Prine’s (2001) investigative report, only 49 of the 129 schools could identify the Title IX officer.
Unfortunately, no scholarly research exists on how booster club behavior impacts gender equity in school districts, due primarily to a lack of valid and reliable data on booster clubs. Booster club financial information has been traditionally difficult, if not impossible, to obtain even in the school district in which one resides because many school districts do not require booster clubs to release their financial statements, resulting in lax oversight of booster club behavior and potentially inequitable treatment of male and female student athletes.
Research Questions
This paper addresses the following research questions:
1. What percentage of high schools utilizes one booster club for the entire school, compared to one for each individual sport?
2. What school district official(s) receives information on booster club activities, including how much is spent and where.
3. What are the characteristics that predict which schools are likely to utilize a model in which all sports have their own booster club?
Methods
Data
In September 2015, a list of public high schools and their websites were accessed from the Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction (WI DPI, 2015) and were used to gather the school district-specific information necessary for the study, as well as to determine the name and email addresses of each high school athletic director (AD), the person most likely to know about booster clubs. A booster club was defined in the survey as “parent groups or community groups that are formally associated” with the high school, that typically holds fundraisers or secures business or corporate sponsorships to assist in the expenses associated with the athletic team(s). The ADs of all 414 public high schools in the state of WI were emailed a 20 question survey in order to obtain information that was not available from WI DPI or schools’ websites. Each athletic director was contacted twice via email over the course of three weeks and asked to complete the survey. A total of 175 surveys were returned, yielding a 41% response rate. Of these, six schools did not have a booster club, so they were eliminated, resulting in a sample size of 169. In terms of school enrollment size and the number of sports offered, the sample is representative of the target population.
An Overview of Wisconsin Public High School Sports
Table 1 provides summary statistics on the percentage of high schools offering each sport. The sports listed in the table along with the percentages are those officially recognized by the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association (WIAA). The sports listed under “other” are offered by a high school, and a student-athlete has the opportunity of earning a school award for participation, however WIAA does not sanction the sport and thus does not have an all-state competition. Note that the “boy” versus “girl” designation was determined by WIAA. It is recognized that girls do wrestle and play football, as was pointed out by a few survey respondents, but the percentage of girls who play these sports is not available here. Further, in three schools, girls play on the boys’ golf team. What further complicates the question of girls’ athletic participation is that for the “other” sports offered by the respondent high school, the gender of the sport was not provided.
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In explaining the table, it is necessary to understand what Title IX of the 1972 Educational Amendment requires and does not require. In its 1979 policy interpretation of the law, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) within the U.S. Department of Education charged with enforcing Title IX, had the challenging task of defining gender equity in an educational program – athletics - with unique characteristics. Specifically, it recognized that “separate but equal” was permissible in athletic programs but prohibited in most other educational programs (Bonnette, 2013). For example: “Title IX should not be violated by the institution that offers football only to men and field hockey to women. Furthermore, if men were highly interested in baseball, there should be not compliance concerns if women were mildly interested in softball, but highly interested in volleyball, and the institution allocated its resources accordingly” (Bonnette, 2013). Title IX does not require a school offer the same number of sports for girls and boys, the same sports for girls and boys, nor that it spend the same amount on girls and boys in the same sport. OCR determined that schools may choose to emphasize different sports and benefits for girls and boys, otherwise known as “offsetting benefits” (Bonnette, 2013). As long as the benefits are of equivalent weight, a school’s athletic program is in compliance. Note that athletic benefits include not only expenditures on the sport, but also equipment and supplies, scheduling of games and practice times, game and practice facilities, travel and per diem allowances, tutoring, coaching, locker rooms, medical and training facilities and services, publicity, and support services. (For further information on Title IX, please see Women’s Sports Foundation (2016) and Bonnette (2013)).
Within this context, it is important to note that differences in the number of sports offered by schools and recognized by the WIAA – 13 for boys and 12 for girls – does not indicate a violation of Title IX, nor does the difference in the percentage of schools offering a specific sport for both girls and boys. For example, 88.6% of schools offer golf for boys, but only 53.6% offer golf for girls.