Righting the balance in the athletics-academics equation: given more pressing concerns, superintendents don't often get involved in overseeing interscholastic sports in their districts.

Sports have played an important part in Terry Grier's life, no doubt about it. As a high school student in Fairmont, N.C., Grier lettered in four sports. After college, he became a teacher, then a coach, then a high school principal. Eventually he joined the ranks of superintendents, serving districts from Sacramento, Calif., to Akron, Ohio, the town that delivered LeBron James from high school to the National Basketball Association.

But when he returned home to North Carolina in 2000 to guide the Guilford County School District in Greensboro and High Point, Grier, 54, inherited a sporting scandal that eventually rocked the state and shocked almost anyone who heard about it.

Following up on a dismissive comment made by a student in one of the district's 14 high schools, Grier discovered some coaches in that school were consistently fielding ineligible athletes on teams that went on to compete in statewide tournaments. Coaches had asked teachers to change students' grades and attendance records to cover up the infractions.

Grier told his school board they had to report the rule-breaking to the North Carolina High School Athletic Association. And they were honor-bound to do something else, he insisted to the cheers of some board members and the chagrin of others: Hire an outside law firm to investigate whether such cover-ups were happening in the other 13 high schools in the district, which with almost 70,000 students is the state's third largest.

Eventually, the investigation revealed that 11 of Guilford County's 14 high schools had fielded a total of 28 teams and four cheerleading squads with students who had missed more than the allowable number of school days. Under North Carolina rules, students who exceed 13.5 days of absence in a semester can't compete in sports the following semester.

Most infractions resulted from sloppy recordkeeping, Grier says. But not all.

"Some coaches knew they were playing kids who'd missed 70, 80 days of school," Grier says. "I just decided we're not going to deal with that. We're not going to have that here."

Clear Priorities

Guilford County's revelation meant the school district forfeited more than 100 games, returned more than $26,000 in playoff revenue and paid $15,500 in fines. Two athletic directors lost their jobs. The district fined several other athletic directors, coaches and principals.

Most school board members supported Grier's decision, but he took some heat from angry parents. And his colleagues from other school districts weren't too happy with him either, Grier says. After the Guilford County news broke, the North Carolina High School Athletic Association requested a statewide review of high school athletic records. Forty-eight schools eventually reported using ineligible players in a wide array of sports.

"We want to make sure we are students first, athletes second," Grier says as he describes his philosophy. "I'm very competitive. I want to win. If I played a blind man in checkers, I'd want to win. I just won't cheat to do it."

Ultimate Authority

Sports are big business in America these days, and not just at the professional and college levels. It's everywhere.

The discriminating television viewer can watch Little League games on cable channels, and ESPN regularly broadcasts high school football and basketball games matching schools from across the country. Youngsters as young as 10 travel widely on club teams to play in hyped-up tournaments with their frenzied parents sporting team colors and yelling encouragement or barbs from the bleachers. High school booster clubs raise big coffers to build stadiums many college teams would be proud to call home.

So it's only natural that school district leaders should feel the pressure, experts say, of parents bent on their sons and daughters gaining playing time at all costs in the hopes they can become the next Kobe Bryant or Tiger Woods.

While many superintendents cede oversight of interscholastic sports to athletic directors and coaches, Grier's case suggests the superintendent bears the ultimate responsibility to make sure everyone follows the rules and that no one loses sight of a school's No. 1 goal: educating students. True, sports and extracurricular activities offer their own supplementary educational benefits, but academics should come first, says Robert Kanaby, executive director of the National Federation of State High School Associations, whose membership includes the state bodies that govern high school athletics and activities.

School districts need a "clearly defined purpose for their athletic program" that syncs with their overall mission statement, Kanaby says.

Mike Hill, deputy director of the National Association of State Boards of Education, calls interscholastic sports "the elephant in the room that no one's been talking about in terms of high school reform." His group in October 2004 released a study, prompted by a request from the organization's members, that found school leaders generally had little information on how participation in athletics affects academics. Especially in this age of heightened federal accountability that demands yearly increases in student achievement, the superintendent is the obvious leader on this issue. But that can be easy to say and hard to do, Hill says.

Among the NASBE study's conclusions was that state boards of education should work closely with state athletic associations to increase academic standards for athletic eligibility. Indeed, the Iowa Board of Education --inspired by the NASBE study--voted in March to require high school athletes to pass all their classes to be eligible to participate in sports. Previously, athletes were required to pass only four classes per semester. Actions such as these could relieve some of the pressure for individual school districts, Hill says.

"It's difficult for superintendents to stick their necks out on this," Hill says. "For them, it's a no-win situation in many cases."

Community Desires

The parallelism with intercollegiate athletics is striking in some respects. Many believe university presidents long ago turned a blind eye to questionable practices in their institutions' sports operations by relinquishing oversight to athletic departments. This belief contributes to a state now where vocal alumni boosters and financial interests lead to widespread concerns over student eligibility, recruitment of high school athletes and boorish behavior by participants and their backers.

In many local communities, athletic interests in secondary schools seem to prevail over academic needs. Yet confronting issues in athletics often puts school leaders in the face of parents and community boosters whose priorities may differ from those of the educational leader but who bring lots of political capital and financial support to the school system. Smaller, more remote communities especially define themselves by scholastic athletics. Community residents rarely will turn out in droves to pass budgets except when sports are in jeopardy. And sports booster clubs sometimes raise huge sums to support varsity programs.

Hill recognizes that superintendents have to develop the kind of school district the community wants. And most communities want winners.

Joe Gillis, a school board member in the 6,000-student Bridgewater-Raynham School District in Massachusetts, came to that realization when he began suggesting a change in school start times. The parent of a 1st grader and a 6th grader, Gillis had read studies of circadian rhythms that suggested teenagers would perform better in school if their classes began later in the day. Elementary students, on the other hand, can handle early starts and tire as the day goes on.

As in most districts, start times in his district, located 25 miles south of Boston, were just the opposite. High school classes begin before 8 a.m., and elementaries don't start until 9 a.m. With Bridgewater-Raynham striving to improve its students' academic performance, why not rearrange school hours, Gillis suggested.

His idea proved too complicated in large measure because it would affect high school sports practices and competitions. Bridgewater-Raynham's high schools dismiss by 2 p.m., which means competitions can begin by 3 p.m. If Bridgewater-Raynham made a unilateral change, its teams would be competing on an unlevel playing field against the other high schools in its league.

William Bainbridge sees scheduling as an issue ripe for reform by superintendents who want to restore a balance in the athletics-academics equation.

Bainbridge, a former school superintendent who is chief executive officer of SchoolMatch, a consulting firm in Columbus, Ohio, decries the practice of scheduling extracurricular activities--particularly athletic events--on weeknights. His company audits school districts around the country, and Bainbridge has observed many a student asleep in a morning class, he says. Who can blame them when they're out late playing in some school-sanctioned competition, he says, and then expected to perform well in school the next day?

"I think the superintendents need to take the lead in saying if the student can't be home--home, not just back at school--by 10 o'clock, then they shouldn't have it," Bainbridge says. "Somebody's got to put a foot down. This is school."

Present Excesses

The loudest critics of high school interscholastic athletics echo that view. Decades ago, they say, school sports did not undermine the school day. Children did not hit the soccer fields as 3 and 4 year olds, booster clubs didn't dictate the sorts of athletic facilities schools should have. School athletics were competitive, but it was all in the name of fun for the students, not entertainment for the adults, the argument goes.

Maybe that's a rosy view of the past, but there's no whitewashing the present and its many examples of the excesses of sports madness in public schools, says Bruce Svare, director of the National Institute for Sports Reform in Selkirk, N.Y. In his 2004 book Reforming Sports Before the Clock Runs Out, he ticks off example after example from the secondary school ranks. These include:

* A New York school district well known for its championship football teams could not muster public support for tax increases to support academic reforms, but its booster club raised enough money to build a new football field;

* A school district in the Pittsburgh area spent $10 million to renovate a stadium and build a 13,000-square-foot field house; and

* Football-stadium building projects at high schools in the Dallas area alone have totaled $180 million over the last few years.

For all the emphasis on competitive sports, school-age children in the United States are experiencing an epidemic of obesity. Although the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommends that children exercise every day, the number of students participating in daily high school physical education classes dropped 10 percentage points from 1991 to 2001, according to the federal agency.

Like others who question how scholastic athletics have risen to such a level of importance in the United States, Svare sees a cultural shift at work. A psychology professor at the State University of New York at Albany, he believes public schools should be stemming the tide, instead of being swept along to the ultimate detriment of students. Svare says no conclusive research links academic performance to participation in interscholastic athletics, even though that argument often is raised to justify spending on interscholastic sports teams and facilities.

"These decisions to finance huge sports facilities--how can we do that when we can't conjure up more money to pay teachers for smaller class sizes?" Svare says. "Superintendents have to tell the truth, make difficult decisions."

Football Craze

Often, the pressure from the community can be overwhelming. Far too many parents try to relive their own aborted sports careers through their kids. One school board member in New York led an effort to fire the superintendent after his child flailed to make the varsity team.

In many towns and cities across the country, the success of high school sports teams defines the community. Think "Friday Night Lights," the book and film about the residents of Odessa, Texas, and their obsession with the Permian High School Panthers football team. Or "Hoosiers," a 1986 film about an Indiana high school basketball team and its trip to the state championship. A Valdosta, Ga., cable channel broadcasts a popular television show about the Valdosta High School Wildcats football team. And USA Today long ago brought notoriety and even mythical status to high schools in the largest cities and the tiniest burgs when it started to publish its Top 20 rankings in an array of scholastic sports.

"As long as there is community energy and enthusiasm to maintaining a high-profile extracurricular program, you've got to put that emphasis," says Roy Benavides, a retired Texas superintendent whose last district was the Ector County School District, home of Permian High School.

When John Wilson was a young superintendent in football-crazed Texas, he soaked up a bit of advice he never forgot. His first superintendent job was in Cuero, Texas, a town of 8,000 that was wild for its football team, the Gobblers. Major crowds turned out on Friday nights for the Gobblers' games. As Wilson assumed the top job there, the outgoing superintendent told him it was a great place to work if he just remembered one thing.

"He said, 'You can do most anything. But if you mess with football, you're gone,'" says Wilson, now retired from the superintendency and running his own consulting firm in the Houston area.

Superintendents in such situations have to find a way to deal with those attitudes even while they strive to carry out their charge to educate children. Wilson says he kept in the forefront the fact that he was an advocate for all children, not just the fraction of the students in any district who plays varsity football or basketball.

Scholarship Appeal

All the fuss over athletics really benefits the few. Yet schools have to deal with what society hands them. And American society is increasingly becoming consumed by sports, says Wilson Sears, superintendent of the 1,600-student Somerset Independent School District in Somerset, Ky., an hour south of Lexington.

At 65, Sears has seen a lot during his years in education. Right now, he doesn't like some of what he's seeing: Organized sports creeping in to the elementary schools, parents viewing athletics as their children's sole ticket to a better life, and families ceding control of their time to a child's sports schedule.

For some parents with children who exhibit talent at sports, the vision of raising the next phenom becomes overwhelming. Realistically, few make it to the top. Nationwide about 7 million teenagers participate in athletics at the high school level each year. Some sort of college athletic scholarship--ranging from the National Collegiate Athletic Association's Division I universities to community colleges--goes to only 465,000 students a year, says Kanaby, who heads the National Federation of High School Associations. And only Division I schools offer full-ride scholarships; others are a combination of financial aid and athletic stipend, he adds. The chances of snagging even one of those aren't great.

"There are far more academic scholarships out there," he says.

Couched in different terms, it's more rational for a family to dream of their child becoming a doctor than a professional athlete. But try telling that to some parents. Americans love tales about beating the odds. That's likely why stories about underdog teams making it to state tournament and underprivileged children rising to greatness through their athletic prowess resonate.

And a lot of poor families believe sports are the only way out, Grier says. When children live their whole lives in poverty, they often have a hard time seeing the connection between education and a meaningful job. For them, the state championship becomes the brass ring, but they give little thought to what that brass ring means after high school, Grier says.

Sears explains it this way: "People look at sports not as recreation and play but as the beginning of an economic explosion for the entire family," Sears says. "The negative result is that many are left seriously behind in the academic world, and then the opportunity to become responsible adults in the real world goes down the tubes."

Don't get him wrong: He's a sports fan. Sears has been a player, a coach and an athletic director before becoming a superintendent. There's an important place for sports and other extracurricular activities, he says. But schools can't bow to the pressure wrought on them by a sports-crazy society, he says.

"There are some things that we can't change," Sears says. "We can't change the lure of the professional sports dollar and we can't change the rising cost of college. We have to look at it as what can we do in our district to ensure a healthy environment for our kids to participate in sports?"

Maine's Reform

Throwing out interscholastic sports would be as wrong as paying too much attention to them. For some students, the chance to participate in sports might be the only thing keeping them in school. For others, proficiency in sports truly will open doors to higher education. That's a reality that educators can't afford to overlook.

Playing on a sports team also teaches certain socialization skills that can't be easily learned in a classroom, says Mike Slagle, athletic director of the 19,000-student Blue Valley School District in Overland Park, Kan., a Kansas City suburb.

To that end, Slagle emphasizes three things when he meets with his coaches at the start of each year: They have to teach students to compete; students need to leave feeling they've had a positive experience; and they have to play by the rules. Participating in team sports can impart lessons of discipline and character that might not be easily taught in an English class, Slagle says.

"You are part of a larger plan," he says. "It's just not all about you. You're responsible to your teammates. Our kids need to learn that at an early age."

And despite the dearth of studies to this effect, many superintendents maintain that students who participate in extracurricular activities do their schoolwork, too. With eligibility rules demanding passing grades, students don't want to lose their chance at staying on the team, says Kerwin Urhahn, superintendent of the 846-student Portageville School District in southeast Missouri.

"We want our kids to be involved in activities," says Urhahn, who in July will become executive director of the Missouri State High School Activities Association. "It keeps them out of trouble elsewhere."

Balance is the key. A program taking Maine school districts by storm hopes to inspire schools to teach their students the art of healthy competition while keeping the importance of sports in perspective. In January 2005, the Maine Center for Sport and Coaching at the University of Maine unveiled the program called Sports Done Right. Twelve districts around the state are piloting the program, including the 3,600-student Auburn School Department, 30 miles north of Portland.

The program dovetails with the district's decision to treat its sports and activities as co-curricular rather than extracurricular, Superintendent Barbara Eretzian says. With Sports Done Right, students learn that good citizenship is expected on the playing field, too. Coaches, school board members and the community by and large were receptive to the program, Eretzian says, adding, "It's a great framework for saying, 'This is what we expect.'"

The program also impressed Jim Hamilton, the athletic director of the Mapleton Public Schools in Denver. He flew to Maine last year to attend a Sports Done Right conference, looking for advice on keeping sports in the proper perspective in his district, which has 5,600 students.

Hamilton and his coaches already emphasize to players and parents that schoolwork must come first, he says. Parents and athletes sign an agreement each year acknowledging that the district will check grades weekly. Students who aren't passing at least five classes won't participate until the grades improve, he says. That rule is backed up by one instituted by the Colorado High School Activities Association; Hamilton sits on the association's board of control.

"Athletics is not an inherent right for anyone to participate in," says Hamilton, a former coach. "It's a privilege earned through good performance in the classroom."

A Governing Role

State athletic associations can be a major influence on the role of sports at the district level. With most boards dominated by athletic directors and high school principals, they can create their own rules for eligibility and conduct of competitions, often with minimal or no direct input from superintendents. They also serve an enforcement role. In addition, state association rules can shield some districts from outside political pressures, some contend.

In Missouri, Urhahn says, high school varsity teams were prohibited for years from participating in competitions outside a 250-mile radius of the school. That meant no traveling to New York or Hawaii for national tournaments or cheerleading competitions. It also meant that high school bands couldn't march in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade.

Last year, though, members of the Missouri State High School Activities Association voted to allow schools to compete in one far-flung tournament or competition annually per sport, as long as the travel didn't interfere with class time. For most school districts, Urhahn says, that translates to the possibility of competing in an out-of-state tournament over winter or spring break. "The schools asked for that," he says.

In Washington state, the board of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association wants to broaden its representation. Art Jarvis figures that's how he ended up on the board. The superintendent of the 5,000-student Enumclaw School District, located an hour southeast of Seattle, Jarvis, 62, doesn't feel like the odd man out on the board, although he's the only superintendent. But he does feel like he's getting a better understanding of why many superintendents are happy to relinquish oversight of athletics to other administrators. With funding and huge curriculum changes demanding so much attention, superintendents likely are happy to hand over one piece of the pie to someone else, Jarvis suggests. "But at some point, superintendents need to pay attention," Jarvis says. "Athletics and activities represent a huge part of the public's engagement."

Unpopular Decisions

When superintendents do pay careful attention to what's happening in their competitive sports programs, they sometimes discover they have to rein them in. Those likely won't be the fun moments, says Raj Chopra, superintendent of the 24,000-student Phoenix, Ariz., Union High School District.

During his 30 years as a superintendent, Chopra has served districts in Iowa, Kansas, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Texas. Each locale has its own sport that draws rabid fans. Chopra felt the heat several times for making unpopular decisions that affected his districts' interscholastic athletics programs.

In the Shawnee Mission School District in Overland Park, Kan., declining enrollment forced Chopra and the school board to realign district schools. The board ended up closing several junior high schools and establishing middle schools. Interscholastic sports left the middle schools, replaced by intramural sports in which any child could play any sport. Chopra pushed the change in the belief that intramurals offered the best opportunity for the greatest number of students to participate.

But from the time of the change until he left the district five years later, Chopra felt pressure from some patrons to bring interscholastic athletics back to the middle schools, he says. He resisted, and so did the school board.

A superintendent's job is to present the facts to the board while urging them to keep the educational priorities of the district, Chopra says, adding, "Superintendents at least try to bring a balance."

Route to Success

That's what Grier, the superintendent in Guilford County, N.C., strives for. He empathizes with sports fans. He knows folks become passionate about their teams. He lives in North Carolina, after all, where basketball rules. He's been in Ohio and Texas, too, where football is the name of the game.

Growing up in the Tar Heel State, Grier played for his high school football team. He wasn't good enough to play in college, but that wasn't his goal. His father had dropped out of school. His grandfather was a sharecropper. But Grier persevered and now claims a doctoral degree from Vanderbilt University.

A good high school education, not his teenage sports abilities, put him on the road to his life today. "There is this sense that (sports) is all we have," Grier says. "And it just can't be that way."

RELATED ARTICLE: Do superintendents have a say on statewide sports matters?

The rules governing interscholastic athletics are as complex as those at the collegiate level but with more bodies setting the standards.

Every state has an activities or athletics association, comprised of representatives from public and private schools, charged with setting eligibility requirements and rules for practice, regular-season play and tournaments. Some associations govern all activities outside academics, including music, cheerleading and drama. Most have boards of directors gleaned from member schools and other affiliated bodies, such as organizations representing superintendents or high school principals.

Thirteen state association executive directors are former superintendents, and 32 association boards have at least one superintendent as voting members, according to the National Federation of State High School Associations. But with superintendents and their school boards ultimately responsible for enforcing rules of eligibility and fair play, are the views of top school system leaders adequately voiced on these statewide governing boards to ensure that academic interests take priority over athletics?

It's a legitimate question to raise when one large state now runs state championships in five sports for boys and girls in grades 7 and 8, and another state athletic association has removed limits on out-of-state travel by high school sports teams.

All-Principal Board

That question isn't easy to answer. While every state association and its governing board serves the same purpose, they all function slightly differently, tailored to meet the needs arising in that state, says John Johnson, communications director for the Michigan High School Athletic Association.

"We all have common roles, but we all take different roads to get there," Johnson says.

Michigan's board of directors, for example, includes five superintendents, along with school board members, principals and athletic directors. Those wanting to serve on the board must declare their intent to run for one of the 14 elected positions from different regions.

In Illinois, a state with about 750 high schools, the board of directors of the state association, in contrast, is made up of high school principals, although some individuals from smaller districts also function as the superintendent. The feeling in Illinois is that principals are situated where the rubber hits the road in terms of how athletics affect students in their schools, says Marty Hickman, the executive director.

"I think that's a great way to go about it," he says. "I think the principal in the building is the one who has the broader perspective. The principal knows what goes on at his or her own building."

In Pennsylvania, only two of the 30 board members of the interscholastic athletic association are superintendents, but those members still carry a lot of clout. The superintendent representatives raised pointed concerns a few years back about a rule change moving up the start of the football season to early August in the Pittsburgh area so schools there could finish their own playoffs before the start of the state tournament.

But association members from the rest of the state cried foul, asserting that the early start gave those schools an unfair advantage. After the issue blew up, the board of the Pennsylvania Interscholastic Athletic Association rescinded the schedule change.

The association always has viewed sports as an extension of the classroom and doesn't want anything, even revenue-generating playoffs and state championships, to operate to the detriment of academics, says Melissa Mertz, the PIAA assistant director.

Now all varsity football practices statewide begin at the same time with the first games scheduled in September. And the board moved back its championship finals to December so high schools had time to fit in all their games.

Underrepresented Views

Any rule change in California must go through a lengthy process before it ever reaches the California Interscholastic Federation's whose executive committee is heavily tilted toward superintendents, who fill four of the nine seats. While superintendents are "very much in the process," according to the federation's Communications Director Emily Zack, they aren't supposed to cast their votes on bylaw changes or other matters based on their job titles. They're on the federated council as representatives of their section of the state, and they have to vote the way their constituents tell them to, Zack says.

A few years back, the staff and board of the Washington Interscholastic Activities Association began discussions about how to make the governing body more inclusive. Those talks at first focused on increasing the participation of minorities and women, says executive director Mike Colbrese, but quickly moved on to another underrepresented group--superintendents.

It wasn't just a matter of fairness, Colbrese says. Including superintendents just made sense because they bring a wealth of knowledge to their job from having served in a variety of positions in school districts. "They're people who have to, because of their responsibilities, see a broader perspective," Colbrese says.

An advisory committee made up of superintendents meets with the WIAA three or four times a year, which has opened communication. And Art Jarvis, superintendent in Washington's Enumclaw School District, serves as one of 10 voting members of the WIAA board. Jarvis is the only superintendent with a vote.

Jarvis says his experience on the athletics board has been educational, and he takes seriously his role representing other superintendents. He believes he can be a conduit between the board and his colleagues in the Puget Sound region.

That's what Colbrese hopes happens. Membership in the WIAA is determined by school board members. Superintendents have the greatest amount of interaction with board members of any of the constituent groups on the WIAA board, he says. They need to understand what goes on at the state association.

--Kate Beem

RELATED ARTICLE: The superintendent as head coach.

J. DUKE ALBANESE

Each year, in far too many school districts, the superintendent and the school board find themselves embroiled in a major sports-related controversy. These unanticipated matters require tremendous time to resolve and take a high toll on relationships and the public trust.

Stories and unfortunate events abound: spectators harassing officials, coaches and even our young student-athletes; a coach's thoughtless handling of young charges; bands of parents pressing for removal of coaches who are short on the winning side; athletes abusing drugs and alcohol; and the too-frequent spectacle of out-of-control parents screaming at each other in the stands or on the sidelines, embarrassing their children and setting poor examples.

My career in public education included a long tenure as a school superintendent and as a state commissioner of education. The challenges were many, the rewards great, and yes, sports programs did test my professional skills and personal fortitude.

A Firm Resolution

I remember when the high school principal and the police chief beckoned me to the high school to speak to all of the students. In an act of solidarity, the student body had walked out of the school in a massive demonstration protesting my decision to not rehire the popular head varsity football coach. Dealing with this dramatic student demonstration and the widespread news media attention was daunting, but it paled in comparison to the reaction of many members of the public, several school board members and some of my dearest friends--all of whom were distressed with my decision and demanded I reinstate the coach.

However, my resolve was firm. The teaching performance of this coach was less than stellar, and there was evidence of inappropriate behavior regarding students.

And then there was that Sunday visit when the coach of the varsity girls' basketball team informed me that he was resigning midseason--right then and there--not because of the students (he said he loved them) and not because of the won-loss record (the team was 11-0 at the time). He was quitting because of the parents and their unending pressures and demands regarding playing time of individuals, coaching strategies and their obsession with their own children as opposed to the success of the team.

The Lead Steward

I survived these incidents, but sports oversight proved a continuing challenge to my leadership responsibilities and to the welfare of the student-athletes I was charged to support.

One thing became clear to me then and it is even clearer today. If, in my home state of Maine and in communities nationwide, interscholastic sports programs are to prosper and to serve our youth well, then we must act to bring about change. And that difficult work of change rests in large part with the superintendent who is committed to making the athletic experience positive, solidly connected to the school mission and the learning process, sensitive to the developmental levels of children and adolescents, and grounded in a set of beliefs and practices similarly embraced by faculty, parents, community and student-athletes.

Indeed, the superintendent of schools is the head coach and as such must be the lead steward for doing sports right. This stewardship requires the moral courage to advocate for change and the return to a sense of balance in how we conduct our interscholastic athletic programs.

Maine's Example

Our work in Maine offers superintendents some food for thought, as they lead and oversee the middle school and high school athletic programs in their districts. These ideas are embedded in the core principles, core practices and out-of-bounds elements that form the heart and soul of the seminal document entitled "Sports Done Right: A Call to Action on Behalf of Maine's Student-Athletes." Key action steps for the school superintendent committed to ensuring a school sports program consistent with "Sports Done Right" include:

* Serving as a steward for student-athletes, advocating for a communitywide conversation about interscholastic sports;

* Embracing a set of core principles and core practices--standards for sports--that describe a healthy sports experience for the young student-athletes of your district;

* Developing and advocating adoption by the school board of a district philosophy statement to guide athletics in your district's middle and high schools;

* Organizing and charging a school and community leadership team with the responsibilities of generating a community conversation and advising the administration and school board about needed changes in the sports program;

* Ensuring all policies and practices governing sports are analyzed against the adopted district philosophy and the core principles and core practices--bringing necessary policy revisions and new policies to the school board for adoption;

* Ensuring the hiring, supervision, retention and non-renewal of coaches follows a comprehensive process directed by capable administrators;

* Ensuring the voice of student-athletes helps to inform all aspects of how athletics are conducted in the school district; and

* Restoring sports as an activity of important learning for young people, not as a bastion of high-pressure competition and entertainment for adults.

If, as a nation, we are to ensure healthy sports experiences for our youth, we will need strong leaders--in our school districts and among our communities--and enlightened views of youth development. We'll need school superintendents to be those head coaches, willing and able to envision, design and advance sports programs that serve our student-athletes well.

Duke Albanese, former Maine commissioner of education, is co-director of Sports Done Right at University of Maine in Orono and senior policy adviser at the Senator George J. Mitchell Institute in Portland. He can be contacted at University of Miane, Shibles Hall, Orono, ME 04469. E-mail: dalbanese@ mitcbellinstitute.org

RELATED ARTICLE: A Maine idea captures sports leaders' attention.

The core principles and practices of "Sports Done Right" have captured the attention of educators, school board members, policymakers, parents and citizens throughout Maine and across the nation.

More than 250 Maine communities have participated in training and/or initiated community conversations around the 45-page publication developed in 2005 by the University of Maine Sport and Coaching Initiative. In addition, educators in 40 states, as well as Canada and the United Kingdom, have requested the report and aspects of the toolkit that we developed to start community conversations.

Additionally, we are working with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges about including "Sports Done Right" as part of the accreditation for secondary schools. Further, we have developed at the University of Maine a candidacy process for school districts seeking distinction and accreditation as a "Sports Done Right" school district. Recently, the Maine legislature passed a resolution embracing the guidelines for use in the state's middle and high schools and community sports programs.

The nationally recognized high school reform work conducted here at the Mitchell Institute has embedded "Sports Done Right" into our whole school change efforts, recognizing the significant role that athletics plays in the culture of high schools and the lives of students.

Copies of the report, as well as the accompanying toolkit, are available at www.sportsdonerightmaine.org.

--Duke Albanese

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ANNE P. WRIGHT

When the Wauwatosa, Wis., School District became embroiled in a school nickname and mascot controversy, the administration and school board decided to compromise: Keep the name but get rid of the mascot. School districts around the country are facing public pressure to abandon school nicknames and imagery depicting American Indians, which opponents say are racist. In Wisconsin, State Superintendent Elizabeth Burmaster sent a letter to all district administrators last December urging school districts that still use American Indian logos and/or mascots to find "positive alternatives."

"There was significant opposition to changing anything initially," says Wauwatosa Superintendent Phil Ertl, and most of the resistance came from school alumni. The administration's recommendation to the school board was to keep the school name, the Red Raiders, which board members recently supported in a 5-2 vote. Since the vote, opposition to other changes has ceased.

The school district has begun removing all imagery related to American Indians, according to Ertl, and students and community members will be involved in choosing a new logo to replace the existing one, which depicts the Red Raiders name with an arrow through it.

Ertl hopes the Red Raiders nickname will go unchallenged. After 16 years, he says, "LaCrosse Central High School is still the Red Raiders." Ertl personally researched Wauwatosa's nicknames and found there was a history of red, the school color, dating back to when the school symbol was the cardinal.

The school district also will begin diversity training for school staff. "Just changing a mascot doesn't do justice to anything," says Ertl, adding 25 percent of the district's students are minority. "We're focusing on doing the right thing."

Time will tell whether the Red Raiders name will endure. "Our belief is that at some point we'll be beyond the point of anything related to Native Americans and we'll still be able to be the Red Raiders," says Ertl. "It's an issue of time and making sure we did our part in letting people know why we did what we did."

Similar Response

Like Wauwatosa, the Morrisville-Eaton Central School District in rural upstate New York compromised by keeping its nickname, the Warriors, while losing the American Indian imagery.

"The school name was never an issue," says former Superintendent Nelson Bauersfeld of its Warriors moniker. The neighboring Oneida Indian nation wasn't offended by the school calling itself the Warriors or by the logo (a headshot of an American Indian), he said. "But we wanted to wean ourselves away from the logo."

That's because State Education Commissioner Richard Mills requested that school districts change logos depicting American Indians. Morrisville-Eaton school uniforms no longer carry a logo, and school stationery now is branded with a medieval-looking crest. "The crest had been around a long time," says Bauersfeld, now superintendent of the Mexico School District, north of Syracuse. "We just weren't using it."

A database of 18,000 records documenting high school mascots found that 10.6 percent of high schools nationwide had American Indian mascots, with Indians and Warriors being two of the top seven, according to Ellen J. Staurowksy, a professor at Ithaca College in Ithaca, N.Y. The top nine mascot categories either were carnivorous animals or American Indians. About 1,500 schools either have stopped using images related to American Indians or somehow altered the imagery, according to Staurowsky.

In Wisconsin, Northern Ozaukee School District Superintendent Bill Harbron is getting ready to bring this issue before the school board and will use Burmaster's letter--and others he received from the Wisconsin Interscholastic Athletic Association and Religious Americans Against Indian Nicknames and Logos--to open a dialogue.

"I told them this [issue] isn't something we can put under the table," says Harbron. "We need to decide what direction we need to go with this. What do they feel needs to be done and what do they feel is the right thing to do?"

One of the issues board members will have to address is whether keeping the school nickname, the Warriors, and logo, a profile of an American Indian in headdress, violates the school district's core values developed four years ago. "Would you call a team the Hispanics or the African Americans?" asks Harbron. "I think the board will struggle with this conversation."

Harbron predicts the major community resistance to a name and logo change will come from community members "whose identity is still tied to the high school, even though they are in their 40s and 50s." One option would be to keep only the school nickname, he says, because a warrior isn't exclusively associated with American Indians.

State Intervention

While some school leaders believe decisions about school nicknames and logos are best made locally, others, like Harbron, would welcome a state response to the issue. "Why doesn't the state pass legislation?" asks Harbron, who says state action would remove the onus from superintendents about how to handle the problem.

Harvey S. Gunderson, president and cofounder of Religious Americans Against Indian Nicknames and Logos, agrees that state lawmakers should intervene because of the attitude among school districts that "we'll change when they require us to change."

"The state athletic association or state legislature can bring about change," Gunderson says. "This often is too hot an issue to deal with locally." The National Collegiate Athletic Association has a policy prohibiting colleges and universities from displaying hostile or abusive mascots, nicknames or imagery at NCAA championships.

However, what finally prompted the Huntley, Ill, School District to change not only the mascot, an Indian chief in headdress, but also the team name, the Redskins, was the threat of a lawsuit.

"Most administrators favored changing the mascot, while the school board opposed the change," says Assistant Superintendent Terry Awrey. "The school board finally decided it wasn't going to spend money on a lawsuit--that money should be spent in the classrooms."

More Nicknames

While American Indian names, mascots and logos have received the most attention and caused the most controversy, administrators agree that other names could become subject to the same kind of scrutiny. Harbron, who has a student with dwarfism attending a district school, says schools should consider all nicknames with negative connotations.

Succumbing to public pressure, the Illinois' Pekin High School Chinks changed its name to the Pekin Dragons and the Naperville Central Redskins are now the Redhawks, according to Fred Willman, a retired teacher and author of Why Mascots Have Tales: From Appleknockers to Zippers.

While some nicknames, such as the Cornjerkers or Fighting Zee Bees, are silly or unusual, others are downright offensive, according to Willman. Consider, he adds, the Midgets, the Savages, the Jungaleers, the Peg Legs, the Satans, the Orientals and the Deaf Hoosiers.

So far, schools seem to be safe with nicknames from the animal kingdom: the Bears, Bulldogs, Cougars, Eagles, Hawks, Tigers and Wolverines.

"There are lots of names people can take issue with," says Bauersfeld, the superintendent in New York state. "Most schools have become pretty comfortable with animals."

Anne Wright is a free-lance writer in Falls Church, Va. E-mail: [e-mail]

Kate Beem is a free-lance education writer in Independence, Mo. E-mail: [e-mail]