Raiders, others help save school sports in Oakland
Credit the Oakland Raiders, other Bay Area teams and generous individuals for saving the Oakland Unified School District from its embarrassing and thoughtless mistake.
On Tuesday night, the Raiders announced that they would make a $250,000 donation to help save the youth sports programs that the Oakland school district had put on the chopping block. Other local teams, including the A’s, Warriors and 49ers, also have plans to contribute, as well as individuals who have already stepped in.
The last-minute rescue mission wouldn’t be necessary if people were paying attention. But, hey, they’ve only had 46 years to learn the law.
Despite almost half a century lead time, too many people in charge of youth sports don’t understand Title IX, which became federal law in 1972. They don’t understand the concept of
equity. They don’t understand legal implications.
That’s the lesson we learned when the Oakland Unified School District made a major misstep last week. The financially strapped district announced that it was eliminating half of its high school sports. A closer look at the numbers and choices revealed that nearly twice as many girls would lose their sports as boys. Oops. A district spokesman said officials became aware of the gender issue on Friday afternoon as they crunched the numbers. That leads one to believe that they made choices without crunching numbers. Which is not exactly leadership.
The financial problems of Oakland’s schools are no secret. In June, an Alameda County grand jury found that the district needed to close schools and reform fiscal practices to stay solvent.
So, yes, there are tough decisions to be made. But a rushed decision that directly impacts the students — not the legions of consultants or district staffers — is absolutely the wrong approach.
Before Tuesday, donations were already coming in: An anonymous gift of $35,000 was made to save girls’ golf and tennis. Another donation will save lacrosse — a girls-only sport in Oakland. Former 49ers kicker Doug Brien — a graduate of De La Salle-Concord and of Cal — has promised to underwrite the $28,000 gap for coed wrestling and is trying to rally community support.
The Raiders’ big announcement came after local teams had spent the day discussing what to do. The quarter million dollars makes up half the district’s shortfall. Mark Davis, who is moving his team out of its original hometown by 2021 or earlier, said in a statement, “The prospect of these kids losing their dreams was difficult to hear for everyone in the community.” The donation will be allocated through the East Bay Community Fund.
That’s an easy and very smart goodwill gesture by the Raiders, and whatever other teams join in. While the $500,000 needed to save all the sports is a lot for Oakland Unified, it’s a pittance for the pro teams that have had Oakland’s support for all these years, even the ones choosing to leave town. After all, the renovations to the Coliseum and Oracle Arena that were made for the Raiders and Warriors have sucked taxpayers’ coffers dry for years.
If soliciting donations was the ultimate goal of the school district’s hurried announcement — and we know that sports has a unique way of galvanizing communities and raising money in a way that a lack of books or pencils doesn’t — it was a shamefully clumsy way to go about it.
The “revenue-producing” argument that colleges use to cut sports while protecting football and blaming Title IX, which assures gender equity in educational programs, doesn’t hold water at the high school level. Revenue is marginal, at best. The intrinsic value to students is supposed to be in the activity: the basic fundamentals of athletics, teamwork, good health, leadership. That’s the benefit of high school sports, a kind of education as important as arts and music.
Almost everyone making these decisions has lived most of their lives in a world where Title IX is the federal law. Yet they still don’t seem to understand it. They will celebrate the Serena Williamses of the world, athletes who rise above their circumstances thanks to opportunity. They’ll worship Stephen Curry, while completely missing some of his personal message.
Curry, the most beloved athlete in Oakland, happened to write an essay on the importance of equity, one that ran in the Players’ Tribune — an online forum founded by Derek Jeter that allows athletes to publish their own stories — the same weekend the Oakland school district was under fire for ignoring issues of equity. Curry was speaking of overall equity for his daughters and other girls, pay equity, job equity — but he brought it back to the basketball camp he recently held for girls in the East Bay.
Curry said his unique camp of 200 girls who love to hoop was “the sort of thing that can help to shift people’s perspectives. So that when someone sees an NBA player is hosting a camp, now, you know — maybe they won’t automatically assume it’s for boys. And so eventually we can get to a place where the women’s game, it isn’t ‘women’s basketball.’ It’s just basketball. Played by women and celebrated by everyone.”
Curry pleaded, “Let’s work together on this. I mean, ‘women deserve equality’ — that’s not politics, right? That’s not something that people are actually disagreeing on, is it? “It can’t be.” It shouldn’t be. Come on, Oakland, take it from your favorite player. You can do better.