DATE: Sunday, June 22, 1997                 TAG: 9706220234

SECTION: SPORTS                  PAGE: C11  EDITION: FINAL 

SOURCE: BY ROBIN BRINKLEY, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: NORFOLK                           LENGTH:   80 lines

COMPLAINTS HELPED MOVE NORFOLK AHEAD AFTER MANY IMPROVEMENTS, NORFOLK SCHOOLS LEAD THE AREA IN GENDER EQUITY ISSUES.

When Norview High's softball field was destroyed last year to make room for construction, team parents protested plans to bus players to Northside Park for practices and games.

Welcome to Title IX, the federal law that bars discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions.

Bert Harrell, athletic director for Norfolk Public Schools and the city's point man on Title IX, ordered Norview to build a new softball diamond on school grounds and required the baseball team to share its facility with the softball team until the new field was ready for use.

``I think that's great,'' said Amelia Morris, mother of a girls basketball player at Maury. ``It shows that Norfolk Public Schools aren't going to tolerate busing girls around. If something is inequitable, they are going to address it.''

Morris is one of a group of parents who three years ago filed a complaint with the U. S. Department of Education's Office of Civil Rights accusing Norfolk of several Title IX violations.

Among their complaints was that the Maury girls basketball team had to bus to Lafayette-Winona Middle School while the boys team practiced at Maury.

Their attempts to negotiate with the school system were rebuffed, Morris said.

``They said there wasn't a problem,'' said Patty Forrester, another Maury parent involved in the complaint.

A lot has changed in three years.

Now Norfolk is the area leader in gender equity issues. Harrell has written policies on fund-raising and donations, established separate accounts for boys and girls teams to make it easier to oversee whether equitable spending is being conducted, and established a list of equipment necessary for each sport.

``We've done an awful lot of work,'' Harrell said. ``I think the people from OCR are happy with what we've done and the parents are happy with the way we've handled it.''

Title IX is most closely identified with colleges and the issue of proportionality; in other words, do athletic opportunities essentially reflect the percentage of females in the student body?

But as the Norview softball field saga illustrates, it encompasses much more that that.

``Most people don't have any idea what Title IX is all about,'' Harrell said.

When OCR intervened in Norfolk the school system undertook a complete examination of the way it does business.

``We took a look at spending at our five high schools and examined whether female athletes were second-class citizens,'' Harrell said.

One way to determine that is through spending.

``If the football team has a pre-game meal that doesn't necessarily mean the field hockey team, which plays in the afternoon, has to have a pre-game meal,'' Harrell said. ``But the girls basketball team better.''

Likewise if a school buys its boys basketball team new uniforms it must make a similar investment in a girls sport.

Donations and fund-raising fall under that same umbrella. If a boys team plans a fund raiser, then the girls must be notified and allowed to participate, Harrell said. Playing times can also be affected. The district plays boys-girls basketball doubleheaders, but alternates which team is playing in the early game and which is playing in the late game so that the teams receive equal exposure. In the past, the girls had always played the early game.

Norfolk has done so well implementing changes that the OCR no longer is monitoring the city's efforts.

``They have demonstrated a good faith effort and done the kinds of things we feel should be done,'' said Charlease Joloza, a spokeswoman for the OCR in Philadelphia.

Often those things are just a matter of attitude, Forrester said.

Last year when Maury's girls basketball team arrived for a game at Cox there was a sign that said ``Welcome Maury Boys Basketball Team.''

``The whole message was that the girls game didn't count,'' Forrester said. ``They even waited for the boys game to play the national anthem.

``You could tell then we had made some strides in Norfolk.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

``Most people don't have any idea what Title IX is all about,'' says

Bert Harrell, Norfolk schools' point man on Title IX.

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