Hello Dolphin Community,

Today we welcomed back all our staff to the district kick off the 2025-2026 school year. Convocation is the one time all year where the entire district meets in one space, and while it is nerve-wracking for me to stand on a stage and stare out at over 600 employees, attempting to deliver a coherent, unifying message for the new school year, it is also an amazingly exhilarating time for me. I love having the staff back in the district and the energy of a new school year. The next level of excitement will come when students arrive in the district on September 3rd. Today, and over the next 3 days, staff will participate in a wide variety of meetings, trainings, and professional learning activities to help prepare them for students' arrival and ensure a smooth start to the school year.

On August 4th, the School Committee voted to adopt a newly revised set of Core Values for DYRSD. You can find the new values here. The Core Values were developed by our Core Values Steering Committee who took wide stakeholder input last year and drafted the values during the months of May and June. We will be excited to share more in the coming months about how Excellence, Integrity, Equity, Community, and Dignity are living out in our D-Y community each day.

As we prepare to welcome students next week, I wanted to let families know that we will be doing focused work surrounding student attendance this coming year. While the percentage of students who are chronically absent (miss 10% - 18 days - or more) in our district has decreased in the last two years, it is still 24% of our students (approximately 750 students). Chronic absenteeism has been shown to negatively impact student learning, graduation rates, literacy, feelings of connectedness to school, and student behavior. One immediate change families will notice is in how we report attendance to families. Please know that starting this year, there will no longer be "excused" and "unexcused" absences. We have come to realize that the term "excused" absence gives the false impression that this type of absence does not matter in the child's attendance record. Please know that all attendance matters and that when reporting information to the state for chronic absence, there are only two categories; present or absent. Therefore, moving forward, we will utilize: present, absent, and absent notified. Absent notified will help schools distinguish which families have contacted the school about a child absence so as to remove them from follow up phone calls or automated messages informing them of their child's absence. We very much appreciate your support in helping ensuring students are in school every day they are able.

Finally, there is some important information in the sections below for the start of the year related to busses and Powerschool parent access. Please take a minute to review these prior to next week.

Thank you for your continued support,

Marc J. Smith, Ed.D.

School bus routes for the "big" busses have been posted to our district website. They can be found by following this link here. For students utilizing D-Y's small busses for transportation, drivers will be contacting families by the end of the week with their specific pick up times.

For any families with an uncertain immigration status and that may be concerned about the care and custody of their children in the event of a sudden detention or deportation by immigration officials, please see this resource created by the Office of the Attorney General that provides guides and legal options. The guides are provided in English, Portuguese, Spanish, and Haitian Creole.