Auditors from the Board of Education, while visiting Cook County Elementary School in Syracuse, Utah, noted what appeared to be a pattern of segregation by sex of students in the lunchroom. The children filed through the lunch line randomly, but when it came time to sit down, the girls chose to sit with other girls, the boys with other boys. Ruth Kunkel, Cook's principal, says "The little girls think: 'Sit with a boy? You've got to be kidding.' That's all it is." Subsequent experiments to try to get the children to sit together failed, so the board decided that the segregation was caused by the kids themselves, not by school employees.

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