Federal officials delivered a stark warning to school leaders and athletic directors earlier this month in announcing a new law enforcement effort: Discriminate against female athletes and the Trump administration will come after you. 

This is just the kind of tough talk we like to hear. About time.

For years no one seems to have been able — or willing — to fix these things in Hawaiʻi even though the state’s own U.S. Rep. Patsy Takemoto Mink played a pivotal role in championing the original Title IX law, a 53-year-old landmark Civil Rights bill that prohibits gender-based discrimination in schools. 

Sure, some of this stuff is hidden but we know that female athletes in the islands have been subjected to indignities, thanks to a 2018 class action lawsuit filed on behalf of students at an ʻEwa Beach high school where female athletes found themselves changing into their uniforms at a Burger King for want of locker rooms.

Then we read the small print in the Trump announcement, where the administration identifies what it considers the greatest threat to women in sports: “pernicious effects of gender ideology” aka transgender athletes.

But wait, we thought: What if we took the offer at face value anyway and included all the other pernicious problems girls and women face that fall under Title IX? 

That would include a way longer list: Sexual harassment, fewer sports opportunities for girls than for boys or for college women than for college men, anything that makes a playing field uneven — including if the girls’ field literally is uneven. 

What if we came up with a list to send this new special unit so it can get a running start? Would Civil Beat readers help?

We already know where to send the list. Ferreting out misogyny in school locker rooms is going to fall to this new joint U.S. Department of Education and Department of Justice special investigation unit known as SIT for short. 

Here’s how the announcement describes it.

Later things begin to get a little more specific with respect to SIT’s aspirations (as we said, “the small print.”)

It goes on to specify …

The truth is that won’t take up all SIT’s time here in Hawaiʻi, where fewer than a dozen transgender athletes compete in interscholastic sports, according to the director of the Hawaii High School Athletic Association.

Which is why we’d like to fill in some important facts about the “discrimination and indignity” female students face here that we think the Trump administration might otherwise overlook. But because of the limited public information available around local Title IX complaints, we’re going to need some help from you to do so. 

Title IX has its own version of small print. One of its weaknesses, in Hawaiʻi as well as nationally, is that it’s complaint-driven, many students don’t know they can file a complaint and the complaints that do get filed are often confidential. 

We do know that the education department has made some big investments in girls’ athletics since settling that class action lawsuit with ʻEwa’s James Campbell High School students in 2023. We also know that the ACLU of Hawaiʻi continues to hear from students and community members about the ways in which schools still favor boys over girls. 

“It’s safe to assume that there are still significant problems out there,” said Wookie Kim, legal director at the ACLU of Hawaiʻi, which filed the lawsuit that started it all. “It’s just a matter of the light has not been shone on those schools in a meaningful enough way.” 

Do Girls Have The Same Facilities At Your School? 

Schools are supposed to analyze their athletics program holistically to make sure boys and girls are getting the same treatment and benefits — from the quality of locker rooms to the availability of coaches and even practice times — right down to the time of day and number of minutes. The starting point, though, often is the facilities. 

The ACLU filed its initial complaint in 2018 after reporting by Civil Beat revealed that female softball players at Campbell High were changing on school bleachers, relying on restrooms at the nearby Burger King and hauling their athletic gear around all day because they didn’t have a locker room — compromises not required of their male peers. 

The state education department can’t say how many students might still be facing similar challenges. The department is currently constructing or planning to put out bids for 11 girls’ athletic locker rooms. But a department spokesperson told us the DOE won’t finalize a list for the Legislature of schools without girls’ locker rooms until sometime next year.

Leilehua High School in Wahiawā is on a list of schools in need of funding to build a new athletic locker room for girls, though Principal Jason Nakamoto said the boys’ locker room is just as badly in need of upgrades. Nakamoto is hoping to build a workout room for girls in the new facility to make up for the fact that the weight-lifting room on campus is mostly used by boys. 

But locker rooms are just one problem. Softball teams, for example, don’t always have the same press boxes or dugouts as baseball teams. At Leilehua, the softball dugout is essentially a chainlink fence with no protection from the rain. Conversely, though, the girls have a press box while the boys’ baseball team does not.

Juggling how to make all of that equal is a difficult challenge — and one that is addressed with little public input and oversight. 

“Athletic directors, who are majority men, are making dozens — if not hundreds — of decisions, little decisions every single day in deciding how to run an athletic program,” Kim said. 

When all those choices are put together, he said, they create a culture in Hawaiʻi that is very much “boys first, girls second.” 

Complaints Are Too Slow

Here’s an area where we agree wholeheartedly with the feds. Title IX complaints, many of which center on sexual harassment or assault, languish for far too long. It’s one of the reasons the new SIT team caught our eye.

The Hawaiʻi education department recorded 36 Title IX complaints in the 2023-24 school year, 28 of which involved a sexual assault report. That’s in addition to the 348 complaints of sexual assault or harassment filed by public school students that didn’t fall under Title IX. Most of the 36 Title IX complaints were dismissed, but eight are still under investigation. 

Far more appalling is the fact that ​​Hawaiʻi schools and colleges have five open Title IX cases under investigation with the federal Office of Civil Rights — two of which were opened against the DOE in 2016. 

That’s nine years ago for those keeping score. Counted another way, if those two complaints were filed by high school freshman, those kids could have graduated college by now without having their complaints resolved. 

That’s just not acceptable. Students only get four years of high school and every year matters. So what do you say, Civil Beat readers? Want to give the SIT team a hand?

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