Scituate School Committee approves three administrators, receives critical Title IX athletic report

SCITUATE — June 1, 2026 — Scituate School Committee unanimously approved three central office administrators and received a sweeping Title IX athletic assessment Monday night that found the district compliant on participation numbers but structurally deficient in budgeting, booster oversight, and the treatment of female athletes. The committee voted 5-0 to appoint Dr. Tom Robb as superintendent, Dr. Joanne Boucher as director of special education following a reopened search that drew eight applicants, and Irene Poole to a one-year contract extension as director of business and finance. Jeff Granatino, a retired superintendent and former Scituate athletic director, then presented a 46-page assessment showing that booster clubs contribute an average of roughly $165,000 annually on top of the district's approximately $1 million athletic budget — nearly all of it flowing outside school accounts — while the base budget has been built as a rollover with no sport-by-sport breakdown, making equity auditing "functionally impossible," in Granatino's framing. Among the specific findings: girls' softball players are required to erect and dismantle a temporary fence before games while no boys' program bears a comparable burden; girls' golf is scheduled for 10 to 12 matches against 18 for boys; and the football program's booster-funded Super Bowl transportation was described as a party bus with strobe lights while the cheerleading squad rode a standard charter — an image one committee member called "one of the hardest things in this report to look at." The full 46-page report was posted publicly the following morning.