SCITUATE — An independent Title IX assessment of Scituate High School athletics found the district meets federal participation requirements, but identified several areas where the district should improve equity for female athletes and recommended a series of operational and policy changes.
Retired superintendent and former Scituate athletic director Jeff Granatino presented the findings to the School Committee on June 1 after spending months reviewing participation data, budgets, booster club spending, facilities, policies and stakeholder feedback.
Granatino emphasized that the review was not intended to judge the overall quality of Scituate athletics, which he described as highly successful.
“This is never a report based on how good or bad the athletic department is,” Granatino said. “The programs here in Scituate are second to none.”
The assessment was launched after concerns were raised last fall about potential inequities within the athletic department. Interim Superintendent Dr. Thomas Raab said Granatino interviewed parents, students, coaches, teachers, administrators and School Committee members as part of the review.
The report found Scituate is compliant with Title IX participation requirements. Over the past five years, female students represented roughly 49.9% of school enrollment and 49.3% of athletic participants, a level Granatino said falls comfortably within federal guidelines.
Granatino said the district also met the second major Title IX participation benchmark by demonstrating a history of expanding athletic opportunities for female students alongside boys programs. Because the district met those standards, the assessment did not need to move to a third test examining whether unmet athletic interests existed.
However, the review identified concerns in what Granatino described as the “equity walk” portion of the assessment, which examined how resources and opportunities are distributed among athletic programs.
Among the issues highlighted were scheduling disparities, concerns about access to athletic training services, uneven promotion of girls and boys sports, turnover among coaches of girls teams, and the condition of the softball field.
Granatino said one of the most frequently raised concerns involved the temporary outfield fence at the softball field. While he praised the overall quality of Scituate’s athletic facilities, he said athletes and parents repeatedly pointed to the fence as a symbol of unequal treatment.
“They have this beautiful field and baseball field's great, football, soccer, field one, field two are all state of the art, but to not always have that fence up to the softball [field] ... has been a concern for a number of years,” he said.
The report also found concerns among female athletes regarding access to trainers before games and a perception that boys programs received more prime-time evening contests under the lights.
Granatino noted that many of those concerns were not always reflected in spreadsheets or participation data.
“A lot of the things besides numbers and whether budget participation, many of the things in the equivalent benefits section are tied to…the intangible. We don't see it on a piece of paper, but they feel it when they're in their athletic setting,” he said.
One of the most significant findings involved the district’s athletic budgeting process. Granatino said the department currently relies on a budget that is largely rolled forward each year rather than being built from the needs of individual programs.
“The rollover budget really has to go,” he said. “That's not a great way to do it.”
Granatino recommended moving to a zero-based budgeting model in which coaches submit itemized requests and administrators build the budget from the ground up each year. He also recommended improved financial tracking systems to better monitor spending by program and evaluate whether resources are being distributed equitably.
The review devoted considerable attention to booster clubs, which Granatino estimated contribute about $165,000 annually to athletic programs. While he repeatedly praised booster organizations and stressed that he was not recommending limits on fundraising, he said the district lacks sufficient oversight of how those funds are raised and spent.
“Very few match the support and the generosity” of Scituate’s booster organizations, Granatino said, adding that “there's some things that might be able to be done to help make it even work a little bit more effectively with the school department.”
“The Boosters are not exempt from being part of the Title IX process,” he added.
Granatino recommended that booster funds flow through district-managed accounts so spending can be tracked and evaluated for Title IX compliance. He emphasized that the recommendation would not prevent booster groups from raising money or supporting teams, but would provide greater accountability and transparency.
School Committee members indicated the findings would likely result in a formal corrective action plan.
The School Committee asked administrators to develop a timeline for implementing recommendations and said they would continue revisiting the findings as corrective actions move forward.
Raab said district leaders would develop a corrective action plan and timeline based on the report’s recommendations, with an initial update expected at the committee’s June 15 meeting.
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