Full Text of the Excerpt

The next thing that happens is I get a call from the assistant superintendent for public instruction inviting me to have lunch with him and the superintendent. And I happened to like the superintendent very much, the hatchet man, I really liked him. He had no hidden agenda. He didn't bullshit. He let you know what—. He was just never playing politics. So we went out to lunch and the superintendent says, "I would really like you to come to work for the Jefferson County Board of Education as a Title IX coordinator.

SARAH THUESEN:

And who was the superintendent again?

SUZANNE POST:

Dave DeRuzzo.

SARAH THUESEN:

Okay, that was him.

SUZANNE POST:

And I thought, "Pretty crafty." I said, "Oh, David. I'd be really interested in doing that with two strings attached." He said, "What are they?" I said, and this was, mind you, back in the 70s, "Well, you have to pay me fifty thousand dollars and I'd have to report directly to you." So I never heard from them again. They advertised for a Title IX coordinator and a lot of people I knew applied and I organized a meeting of all the applicants at one of our houses the week before they were going to have the interviews, and explained to them how important it was to women that they had some power, that the Title IX have some power, and that they aren't going to have power if you go to work for them for seventeen thousand dollars and report to a minority affairs superintendent. So everybody agreed they wouldn't take the job unless certain conditions were met. Well, the job went to a coach, a woman coach, who fancied herself a feminist, but she was part of the system. A few things changed for awhile, but not the way they should have. The interesting thing for me in all of this is that in terms of athletics, the school system started being really responsive to girls once fathers started filing complaints and fathers did, in soccer particularly. Once dads got into it, it was a whole new ballgame.

SARAH THUESEN:

Interesting.

SUZANNE POST:

Yeah, and I don't know what's going on over there now. I'm sure that there's a lot of problems, but things were shaken up for awhile to a degree that I don't think they could have, there is no way they would ever return to the place they were. And athletics was so terribly important because some of these girls were never going to get to college without an athletic scholarship. It was an economic issue, pure and simple.