By Megan Tagami, Civil Beat
Published: Nov. 20, 2025
Lauralee Pierce was taken aback when her daughter came home in September and asked for $300 for bus money. The athletics department at Kahuku High and Intermediate School no longer planned to pay for transporting cheerleaders to football games, Pierce’s daughter said, and families would have to pay for the buses or drive themselves.
The mother of the Kahuku sophomore thought the request was unreasonable, especially since the football team wasn’t being asked to do the same. To see if the school was treating boy and girl athletes equally — something required by a federal law called Title IX — Pierce requested a breakdown of each sports team’s budget and reimbursements over the past three years. She also asked for any policies and documentation the school used to determine which teams received funding and resources.
Last month, the education department told Pierce it would provide the records – for a fee of $83,220.
“That’s an astronomical price,” Pierce said, “which, to me, shows that there’s something that we are hiding.”
The Hawaiʻi Department of Education doesn’t consider cheerleading a sport under Title IX, meaning the resources and funding provided to these teams aren’t taken into account when schools are determining if they’re providing the same opportunities for male and female athletes. Kahuku, Pierce points out, also stopped requesting transportation fees from its cheerleading team after getting pushback from families.
But the 4,161 hours the DOE estimated it would take to fulfill Pierce’s records request about equity in school spending raises questions about how the DOE is tracking compliance with the federal law and how much families have a right to know.
While athletic budgets aren’t the only way to determine if schools are treating boys and girls the same, Title IX advocates say campuses should still track how much they’re spending on sports teams and share that information publicly.
“It’s one of multiple factors,” said Wookie Kim, legal director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Hawaiʻi. When funding disparities are compounded with other issues, such as unequal travel opportunities and access to locker rooms for boys and girls, schools may have a problem with Title IX, he said.
Hawaiʻi schools have faced greater scrutiny around gender equality in athletics after the state settled a lawsuit in 2023 filed by the ACLU on behalf of students at Campbell High School, where girls on the softball team were forced to use the bathroom in a Burger King off-campus or change behind the bleachers. Boys, on the other hand, had their own athletic locker room with storage and restrooms.
Since the settlement agreement, the education department has stepped up its oversight of athletics, requiring high schools to submit annual reports analyzing their treatment of boys’ and girls’ sports and complete walk-throughs of their facilities with a Title IX specialist.
But some of the data, such as students’ participation rates in sports, don’t reflect the full story of whether girls are receiving equal treatment. For example, Kahuku girls’ participation rates in sports nearly matched their overall enrollment rates last year, despite some families’ concerns about the athletic program, including the treatment of female players on the new flag football team last year.
The new reporting requirements are a step in the right direction, said Elizabeth Kristen, legal director of the California Women’s Law Center who also represented Campbell’s female athletes in the 2018 lawsuit. But the public should have more access to Title IX records, she said, allowing families to see for themselves if their schools are providing equal opportunities for boys and girls.
“I’m discouraged that we haven’t seen faster progress,” Kristen said, “despite the many years of litigation we had against Campbell.”
What’s Being Tracked?
While Pierce intended her inquiry to only include the budgets of Kahuku athletic teams over the past three years, it’s unclear if the education department expanded the search to all high schools in the state, increasing the cost of her request.
Pierce asked for the budgets of all Kahuku athletic teams because she wanted to see if her concerns about unfair treatment for cheerleaders applied to other girls’ sports, she said. Schools use multiple measures to determine if they’re providing equal opportunities in athletics, such as comparing the number of boys and girls participating in sports and the benefits, like new uniforms or equipment, that teams receive.
Title IX doesn’t require schools to report their athletic budgets. And funding for sports shouldn’t be a sole measure of a school’s compliance with the law, Kristen said, especially since some teams may naturally require more equipment and larger budgets.
“A school might spend more money on football, and that might be okay from a Title IX perspective, as long as all the other sports were also getting all the equipment and uniform items that they needed,” she said. “So cost is a measure that you can look at, but it won’t be a final determining measure.”
Still, she said, schools should track teams’ budgets and have them readily available.
DOE’s projection that Pierce’s request would cost more than $83,000 provides few details on how the department determined the final cost, except for an estimate that it would require more than 4,100 hours — roughly two years’ worth of work — for staff to review and segregate the records.
DOE gave Pierce the chance to amend her request to reduce the costs, but she said she would like more information on how the department arrived at the $83,000 estimate before making any changes. When she asked what was driving up the cost of her request, the department said the search covered three years and would require a manual review of team records.
Following the Campbell lawsuit, DOE revamped the Title IX self-assessments schools need to complete on an annual basis and has provided more gender equity training to administrators, according to its 2024 athletics plan. The annual self-assessment collects information on nine factors, ranging from the number of uniforms and coaches provided to each team to the practice schedules and transportation athletes receive.
Last year, a Title IX specialist also completed site visits of all DOE high schools to ensure that boys and girls had equitable access to athletic facilities such as locker rooms and fields.
In the 2024-25 academic year, girls made up 42% of athletes at Kahuku, compared to 47% of the entire student population, according to data Civil Beat received through a public records request from DOE. Girls’ flag football — a new sport DOE introduced this spring — recorded the greatest participation from female athletes on Kahuku’s varsity teams.
In Kahuku’s site visit, DOE’s Title IX specialist found that both genders had their own locker rooms, with the girls’ space receiving a higher quality rating than the boys.
But families raised concerns about the treatment of female athletes in Kahuku sports earlier this year. In the spring, members of the girls’ flag football team said Kahuku’s athletic director instructed them to change out of their uniforms on a school bus while a male coach and driver were still on board.
Following the complaint, Kahuku reported the incident to DOE’s Civil Rights Compliance Branch and updated its policies to allow students to change in locker rooms or bathrooms after away games, Hawaiʻi News Now reported in June.
Kahuku Principal Walter Santiago declined to comment for the story.
In the case of the Kahuku records, Pierce could have provided more details on what she wanted her request to include, Kim said. Even still, he said, DOE should have communicated more about what was driving up the costs and how Pierce could narrow her search.
“It is a little bit troubling to me that there’s no explanation,” he said.
More Education Needed
Following the Campbell settlement, DOE developed an online reporting form allowing students and parents to submit complaints about inequalities in sports. Last year, the form received three complaints, all of which were investigated and resolved, said DOE spokesperson Krislyn Yano.
But while schools and the Oʻahu Interscholastic Association are supposed to publish the form on their websites, some families are still unfamiliar with the reporting process.
Alisha Bonifacio said her daughter, a junior at Kalani High School, knows schools need to provide equal opportunities to male and female athletes. But her daughter wouldn’t necessarily know how to file a Title IX complaint or identify specific examples of inequality in athletics, Bonifacio said, even though she plays sports year-round.
“I do think there is a lack of information,” Bonifacio said about Title IX.
Some states have worked to raise families’ awareness around gender equality in sports by publishing Title IX-related data on a regular basis. California requires every school to post annual breakdowns of how many girls and boys participate in athletics and the number of sports teams available for each gender.
At the national level, a bill introduced in Congress this year would have required more Title IX reporting from elementary and secondary schools, including details on how much funding goes toward athletic expenses such as travel, equipment and coaches’ salaries. The U.S. DOE would make these reports publicly available online.
The bill hasn’t advanced in Congress since it was introduced in February.
A 2022 law requires the Hawaiʻi education department to annually publish the number of Title IX complaints schools receive around sexual harassment, assault and other related incidents. But Rep. Linda Ichiyama, who authored the law, said she would want more information on how DOE collects and tracks athletic data before introducing another bill requiring schools to publish more Title IX information related to sports.
Even if more information on high school athletics was available online, Ichiyama said, families would likely want more training to understand what gender equality looks like in sports.
“It’s not just for staff or teachers, but also for students and families,” Ichiyama said. “It’s important, because I think everyone should know their rights.”
More transparency and reporting around Title IX would be helpful, Kim said, but there’s also a need for a cultural change in schools, where more students and administrators understand the federal law and the root of inequalities.
“DOE’s trying harder,” Kim said. “But in my view, they should be trying even harder and doing more.”