VENTURA : New Math Class Recruiting Method

Ventura school officials have said they will change the way they recruit students for math classes where students have all been girls to counter charges that the lessons are discriminatory.

Ventura High School and Anacapa Middle School have been offering sex-segregated math classes since 1993.

Although the programs have gained national attention and have been widely praised, a complaint filed with the Department of Education’s Office of Civil Rights alleges the classes are discriminatory to boys.

To answer that complaint, the Ventura Unified School District has instructed teachers, counselors and others who have steered students into the all-girl classes not to recruit by sex, but by groups that are under-represented in advanced math classes.

Those people typically include girls and some minorities, said Patricia Chandler, the district’s director of curriculum.

“As long as we don’t seem to be recruiting based only on sex, we should be OK,” Chandler said.

Anacapa has one seventh-grade math class for girls only and one for boys. The school also has coeducational math classes for seventh-graders. Ventura High also offers Algebra II and trigonometry classes aimed at females, although boys are not barred, Chandler said.

The schools launched the programs because studies have shown that girls’ grades and interest in math begin to fall off markedly during junior high. Chandler said the federal civil rights office should let the district know if the new recruiting method is accepted within the next few months.