Lack of Jobs for Women Is Alleged

Two female employees of the Ventura College athletic department allege that the school has failed to provide adequate full-time teaching and coaching opportunities for women.

Raeann Koerner and Susan Johnson said if the college does not address the situation they will seek intervention by the civil rights office of the U.S. Department of Education under Title IX requirements that provide protection against job discrimination based on gender.

“We are trying to follow procedures within the college and we are going to exhaust those procedures first,” Johnson said. “If those procedures don’t produce results, then I guess we’d have no other recourse.”

Koerner, a physical education teacher and former women’s tennis coach, and Johnson, a part-time physical education instructor and softball coach, are upset that the school intends to hire a full-time football head coach despite an in-house report that prioritized the department’s need to fill more full-time openings with women.

The report, titled “Self-Review Analysis for the Assessment of Gender Equity in the Athletic Program at Ventura College,” was completed in July, 1996. It was compiled by Koerner and Dick James, Ventura’s athletic coordinator, with the help of internal task forces.

Koerner said the report was prepared to comply with a request from the California Community College Commission on Athletics, which asked schools throughout the state to evaluate their programs for gender equity.

“The plan says we need to have more full-time women’s coaches and it says that the next [physical education] hire needs to be a woman,” said Koerner, who will serve as physical education department chairperson next school year. “We are being hypocritical.”

Ventura is advertising for a football coach to replace George Rosales, who resigned after last season but still teaches at the college. The job announcement is expected to close April 11.

James, a former football coach and assistant at Ventura, said the conclusions reached in the school’s gender-equity report were recommendations.

“It’s not concrete,” James said. “I don’t think I want to respond in the public. . . . I just don’t want to get involved with it.”

Ventura offers nine men’s and eight women’s intercollegiate sports, but only three teams are coached by women--softball by Johnson, women’s volleyball by Miki McFadden and women’s tennis by Maureen Eliot. All three are part-time instructors at the college, Johnson for 11 years.

James, however, said the school is not overlooking women coaches, just being judicious.

“We have ended up hiring men because they [have been] the better candidates,” James said. “There’s nothing that says you have to hire a female to fill a quota.”

But Koerner and Edith Conn, who teaches physical education and English and has been at Ventura since 1962, point to disparities in the men-to-women ratio of full-time physical education instructors at the school. Conn said the breakdown is 10 men to three women--herself, Koerner and Cheryl Holt, aquatics director.

“In the last 27 years, we know that there have been 12 men and only one woman [Koerner] hired in the P.E. department,” Conn said.

If the women take their case to the U.S. Department of Education, the claim could take as long as 135 days to settle, said Roger Murphy of the civil rights office.

“If it’s appropriate, we would attempt to mediate the complaint,” Murphy said. “But if the issues are so great that that’s not appropriate, then we would open a civil rights investigation.”

Challenges by women regarding Title IX noncompliance are common. A notable lawsuit was brought in 1984 against Long Beach City College by several coaches and students who claimed that the school was violating state anti-sex discrimination laws.

A settlement reached in 1989 called for Long Beach to hire a full-time women’s athletic director and three full-time women’s coaches. Two of the plaintiffs in the case, Mickey Davis and Donna Prindle, met with Koerner and others at Ventura College on Wednesday. Davis is the Long Beach women’s athletic director and Prindle is the women’s volleyball coach.

“We are not doing what we said we were going to do [in the report] and, basically, we are going to hang ourselves if this goes to court,” Koerner said. “We’ve had to fight for everything we got and it looks like we are in for another battle.”