A mentoring program at Lawrence’s Free State High School will now include female students after the American Civil Liberties Union of Kansas raised concerns that the program was reserved for males and violated Title IX.

The LEAP Ambassador program is currently in a pilot year at Free State. It held two functions in December and January, pairing 15 male students with male community members, ranging from school district officials to business owners and one former Kansas University basketball player, Wayne Simien.

Female students were not included, which prompted the ACLU’s legal director, Doug Bonney, in late January to raise concerns that it violated a federal law that bans discrimination on the basis of sex in any federally funded education program or activity.

The program was created by Free State assistant principal Keith Jones, with assistance from the Lawrence Education Achievement Partners, an arm of the Lawrence Schools Foundation, which encourages school-community partnerships. Organizers said in January they hoped they could expand the program to all students and schools in the future.

In a statement Wednesday, Superintendent Rick Doll, who participates as a mentor in the program, said:

“Free State High started this effort to motivate young men to be successful in school because our data shows that boys are not graduating at rates comparable to girls. Their intention was to try a strategy to engage boys in their education, not to exclude girls.”

District spokeswoman Julie Boyle said 15 female students would be involved in the program’s next meeting, in March. Female community members will also be invited to participate as mentors.

“Overall, it’s good. They were very nice people; I enjoyed being with them,” Bonney said, referring to meeting with district officials in February over the Title IX concerns.

According to data from the Lawrence school district, 95.3 percent of girls graduated after the 2013-14 school year, while 88.2 percent of boys did. Females have posted a better graduation rate than males in Lawrence since at least the 2009-10 school year.

“We’re trying to foster some leadership characteristics in them,” Jones said in January.

The Ambassador program is the second program at FSHS the ACLU raised Title IX concerns over this year. On Jan. 12, the organization wrote to Doll about male-only and female-only English classes that were created at the school. Those types of settings can be legally created, but Doll replied to the ACLU two days later that the classes had been eliminated, according to a letter received by the Journal-World.

“There are federal guidelines that provide specific protocol for creating such a setting, guidelines that I was unaware of when originally moving forward,” Free State principal Ed West said in an email to the Journal-World at the time. “It has certainly been a learning experience.”