The NCAA has been notified by the U.S. Department of Education that the 1999 Equity in Athletics Disclosure Act (EADA) forms that were required to be submitted to the department on October 30, 1999, will be due at the end of February 2000 through electronic submission only.

The department announced in early October that it was not yet prepared to collect the data that were required to be submitted by individual institutions for this first time on October 30,1999. In a letter to be mailed in early January, the department will formally alert postsecondary institutions of the new requirement and the process by which the submission of the data will be made. The department's decision to require an electronic submission of the data is contrary to earlier statements indicating that paper copies of the forms already completed by institutions could be submitted.

The NCAA provides its member institutions with gender-equity reporting forms and tables that have been approved by the department to satisfy the federal EADA reporting requirement. Those forms are completed on paper and are used to satisfy the public disclosure aspects of EADA requirements. However, the department has determined that the paper forms NCAA institutions completed by the required October 15 public disclosure deadline will not be accepted in place of the new electronic data submission as been indicated earlier.

However, Department of Education officials have indicated they will likely enter into a partnership with the NCAA on the collection of the data to be supplied in February. Although the NCAA collects the data in paper format, the NCAA enters the information into a computer data bank. The proposed partnership would allow the NCAA to supply the data on behalf its membership. Under the plan, the NCAA would extrapolate from each institution's 1999 Gender-Equity Survey that portion of the form pertaining to the federal EADA reporting and submit it to the department electronically.

Through this proposed partnership, NCAA member institutions would not be required to complete a second form, thus reducing the burden on the institution and preventing confusion from the reporting of two similar, but not identical, sets of data.

Details of the partnership are being finalized and should be in place before the department's mailing in early January.

EADA reports chronicle an institution's athletics participation numbers, coaches and their salaries, and total athletics revenues and expenses -- all broken out by gender. These data often are used by the public as a benchmark to assess an institution's gender-equity compliance.