Cat Country 98.1, a local country radio station, will host a father-daughter dance Nov. 15 in lieu of Cranston Elementary School's traditional "Me and My Guy" dance. The dance follows a controversial ban on gender-exclusive events by the Cranston school district this May.
The station decided to provide a replacement for the dance because they "received an influx of emails from (their) listeners," and "as a family-owned station," they sympathized with the residents of Cranston, said Cat Country Promotions Director Briget D'Antonio. Cat Country decided that they "wanted to use their available resources to ease the frustration" and throw a father-daughter dance of their own to support "this time honored tradition," D'Antonio said.
The dance, open to Cranston students in kindergarten through sixth grade and their families, is a charity event whose proceeds will go to Big Brothers Big Sisters of Rhode Island. The dance's charitable nature has drawn big-name country artist and American Idol winner Scotty McCreery, D'Antonio said.
Last spring, Steve Brown, executive director of the Rhode Island affiliate of the American Civil Liberties Union, sent a letter voicing objections to the father-daughter dance and a related mother-son baseball game to Judith Lundsten, then-assistant superintendent and now the current superintendent. Though Lundsten had previously expressed reservations about ending the events, telling CNN that she "truly believe(s) that no one intended to hurt anyone's feelings with this, that they wanted to be inclusive, but they also liked these traditional-type activities," she ultimately recommended that the district ban the gender-exclusive events.
While Lundsten told CBS she did not believe the dance infringes upon Federal Title IX legislation, which exempts parent-child events from issues of gender-discrimination, she said she believed the school's activities to be direct violations of Rhode Island law.
According to the letter written by the ACLU, the dance came to their attention after a "single mother of a student" contacted the ACLU. They took issue with the event because it "excludes not only all boys at the school, but also those female students who, like her child, do not have a close adult male in their life to take them ... (and was) made even more problematic because of its promotion of gender stereotypes."
In a September statement, the ACLU said they believed the issue to have been "amicably resolved with school officials" this past May.
But Cranston Mayor Allan Fung's office offered a different view. Carlos Lopez, Fung's chief of staff, said the mayor believes that these types of events "should not be banned from schools." He does not think they are discriminatory "as long as no one is excluded," Lopez said.
Despite the gender exclusive name of the event, everyone is allowed to attend, Lopez said. Fung also disagrees that the event is a "promotion of gender stereotypes," Lopez added.
Since the ban, the mayor's office has been flooded with calls from "angry parents," Lopez said, but the "issue is not within the mayor's purview legally." Sean Gately, the Republican state senate candidate, has declared his intention to attempt to lift the restriction if he is elected in November.