Solving the math problem seemed simple to one school board member. If, in fact, girls do poorly in math classes with boys, he reasoned, why not put them in math classes for girls?
Charles Vaughn, the board member who is the chief architect and proponent of the classes proposed in Portsmouth, said the issue for young women was their "sense of focus.""Statistics show teachers are more likely to call on boys than girls because the boys shoot up their hands first. It's not that young women cannot do the work. They simply take more time to consider and think things through first."
But Susan Tober, one of the few board members expected to vote against the proposal, strongly disagrees.
A certified public accountant who described herself as a "math kind of person" in her school years, Tober attacked the proposal as reverse discrimination, adding that a "special cuddly class for girls" would "send them the wrong message."
The measure, which will receive a final vote early next year, will make Portsmouth the first public school district in the state to offer a math course for girls.
The district, which has 2,800 children, 920 of them in high school, would join a small number of others around the nation with similar programs. In New England, for instance, education officials know of only one similar public course - in the far northern town of Presque Isle, Maine.
In Ventura, Calif., the public high school has offered an all-girls Algebra II course. In Aurora, Ill., the Illinois Math and Science Academy, a public school, has experimented with a girls-only calculus-based physics class.
Vaughn, who is also a state representative, had long been worried about relatively poor performance levels in math and science by New Hampshire students.
For instance, girls have a tough time with the math portion of the Scholastic Assessment Test. Statewide, in 1993, girls scored an average 467 in mathematics compared with 510 for boys; and in 1992, girls scored 462 in mathematics compared with 505 for boys. Similar disparities date back two decades.
In Portsmouth, 1993 scores for girls in mathematics were about 435, compared with 492 for boys. By last month, Vaughn had persuaded six of the nine board members to instruct the school district superintendent to include a mathematics course for girls in its budget proposal. The school is expected to establish the course for either eighth or ninth grade.
Although early results in Ventura and Aurora showed researchers that the girls benefited from the experience, in both cases, constitutional issues are close at hand. While neither program officially excludes boys, no boys have sought to join them, officials say.
If girls-only classes are overtly established and officially excluded boys, the classes or schools could be counter to the 1954 U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown vs. Board of Education in Topeka, Kan., which established that "separate but equal" education was inherently unequal, as it applied to race in a public schools.
Many lawyers believe the court would rule similarly on the basis of sex. Neither the Ventura nor the Aurora programs have been challenged in court.