St. Louis Park Fastpitch Association - Youth softball facility equality

SUBJECT: Softball Fields in SLP – Need for Equity

How does the City advertise St Louis Park?? What do your promotional materials say???

Experience LIFE in the Park -- Celebrate Your Events in St Louis Park -- Parks & Recreation - Enriching Life, Inspiring Community – Founder of Children First and the 40 Assets
Asset #7 – Community Values Youth
Asset #16 – High Expectations
Asset #27 – Equitable & Social Justice
SLP Public Schools - Achieving Success, One Student at a Time!

These are lines we are all familiar with and can recite when asked why you live in St Louis Park. But what are our actions??

Let’s take a line from a SLP brochure - Experience Parks and Rec in the Park – but let’s do that as you take your daughter to softball practice. You may drive past, Skippy, Northside Park, Dakota, Aquila, Carlson, Freedom/Paul Frank, or Dale Petit Fields, conveniently located throughout the city on your way to Aquila Field #4, the Middle School, or Pennsylvania Park. That is right, you have passed by 9 baseball fields and 7 adult softball and kickball fields to get to one of 4 fields your daughter can play on.

If you were paying attention your saw nicely groomed fields with storage sheds, parking lots, lights, scoreboards, covered dugouts, and other amenities. Most, if not all, of those things are lacking or of lower quality at the 4 fields your daughter is now practicing at.

If you were paying attention to construction activity the last 5 years, you observed over $1,000,000 in City paid improvements to baseball fields and $19,200 to one softball field at Pennsylvania Park.

Then one day your daughter plays a game in a neighboring community and their fields look like Northside or Skippy. On the way home your daughter comments on how nice it was to play there and asks why don’t our fields look like that? Or one day she comes home from school very excited to tell you she finally chose the topic for her 5th or 8th grade IB project. This is the project that culminates a student’s experience and global learning at the end of Elementary and again at the end of Middle School. It needs to be a topic they consider worthy of change and they have to design action steps to reverse the problem. You anxiously ask – What did you decide on??? She says – “Inequity in girls vs boys sports”.

How do you as a parent answer these questions and still try to support the City and their priorities?? The parents signing this letter have all had to come up with answers – what would yours be??

We appreciate your time and attention to this issue of fairness. Please work with us to bring about positive change and equity for the Fastpitch girls of St Louis Park.