SCITUATE — June 1, 2026 — A sweeping internal assessment of the Scituate High School athletic department has revealed systemic Title IX compliance issues, zero-based budgeting failures, and deep culture gaps between male and female sports teams. The 46-page report, presented Monday night by retired superintendent Jeff Granatino, prompted intense frustration from School Committee members who vowed immediate structural interventions to overhaul how athletic finances, scheduling, and personnel are managed.
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Superintendent Dr. Tom Raab introduced Jeff Granatino to deliver the highly anticipated Title IX assessment. The audit was launched in Fall 2025 following a wave of public complaints regarding disparities between boys’ and girls’ sports. While Granatino emphasized that Scituate boasts state-of-the-art facilities and historically successful programs, his findings exposed severe operational and systemic flaws.
On paper, Scituate meets the federal “safe harbor” standard for substantial proportionality in participation, with female student enrollment at 49.9% and athletic participation at 49.3% over the last five years. However, the investigation uncovered critical imbalances across the “equity walk” evaluation.
A major point of contention centered on athletic budgeting and the financial opacity surrounding booster clubs. Scituate’s athletic department operates under a rolling historical budget—currently just under $1 million—that simply adds a 2% to 3% increase annually rather than tracking program-specific needs. Granatino’s review discovered a 10% built-in spending discrepancy favoring boys’ programs in the base budget. Compounding this, the district’s business office was completely unable to track exact expenditures by sport, creating a massive accountability gap.
Furthermore, independent booster clubs add an average of $165,000 annually to sports programs without any structural school oversight. Granatino warned that under Title IX law, if a booster club injects significant funds into a boys’ team (such as baseball), the district is legally obligated to provide equivalent resources to the corresponding girls’ team (such as softball). In a striking revelation, the report noted that the football booster club has been directly supplementing coaching stipends outside of the collective bargaining process, bypassing school committee awareness.
