While my efforts to persuade the Board of Selectmen, the town manager, and the Rec Department director to allocate permits in a more equitable fashion, and to use their power to make sure that the programs using town - owned facilities met minimum standards for inclusiveness and safety, fell on deaf ears (we ended up being forced to use for our home games a dusty field the
high school had essentially abandoned), I returned to a discussion of the «power of the venue permit» 10 years later in my 2006 book, Home Team Advantage: The Critical Role of Mothers in Youth Sports, where I suggested that one of the best ways for youth sports parents to improve the safety of privately - run sports programs in their communities was to lobby their elected officials to utilize that power to «
reform youth sports by exercising public oversight over the use of taxpayer - funded fields, diamonds, tracks, pools, and courts, [and]
deny permits to programs that fail to abide by a [youth sports] charter» covering such topics as background checks, and codes of conduct for coaches, players, and parents.
The fact is that
reforming urban
schools is an issue of social justice: there are too many children in cities across the U.S. who are
denied the opportunity to have a
high - quality education, and these inequities run strongly along lines of race and class.