Hello Dolphin Community,

Earlier this week, I had the privilege of attending the Encore performance of the Winter Percussion and Winter Guard at D-Y High School. For both groups is represented either the final or near final performance of their season and an opportunity for the community to see the culmination of all the hard work they have put in this season. It was a strong reflection of the district's values of both Excellence, as reflected by the student performances, as well as Community in the way the schools and our surrounding community members strengthen each other.

A couple of weeks ago in my last newsletter, I shared information regarding the school district's budget and the pending votes in both Dennis and Yarmouth regarding a proposition 2 1/2 override. View that message on the budget here. Recently, the school district has provided some additional information for people that are hoping to learn more about the budget as well as why an override is needed to fund programming at the schools. You can view a 20 minute video on the budget and override here. Additionally, on Monday (4/6/26) of this week, a presentation was provided to the School Committee. This presentation was focused on providing the Committee with a "contingency plan" for if the override in one or both towns does not pass. Unfortunately, if the overrides do not pass, myself and Committee will need to work to find a way to operate the school district with a budget of up to $2.2 million less than what it needs to fully operate. Following this link will allow you to watch the part of the School Committee meeting where these details were discussed.

To try and help provide the community with as much information as possible about the budget, we will be holding some information sessions over the coming weeks. We will be hosting one here in the District on Wednesday, April 15th @ 7 pm in the D-Y Intermediate Middle School Library (please see the flyer below for more details). We will also be holding one at the Yarmouth Senior Center on April 23rd @ 11 am. We are working on setting up one at the Dennis Center for Active Living as well and will publish those details once we have them. Please feel free to share this information with your friends and neighbors.

Thank you for your ongoing support,

Marc J. Smith, Ed.D.

As mentioned above, the School District will be holding an information session on the budget and pending proposition 2 1/2 override vote in both towns. This information session is open to all members of both communities. Scan the QR code on the flyer to share your thoughts with us ahead of the session, or you can share your thoughts here.

Please share this information with any of your friends and neighbors, whether they have kids in the school system or not. We are interested in hearing from everyone.

On March 25, I held my first listening session of the school year. The listening session occurred over Zoom and almost 40 people participated. The topic of the conversation was, "Why D-Y? What are the opportunities students have as the progress through D-Y and how can we improve?" If you were unable to attend you can watch the listening session here.

I will be holding an in-person version of this same listening session on April 15th (yes same date as the budget information session) in the D-Y Middle School Library at 1 pm. We will have interpreters available for Haitian Creole, Portuguese, and Spanish speakers. I look forward to seeing many of you there!

Following our Snow-cation you may be wondering, "So now when is the last day of school?"

First, I want to point out that there is still more winter in front of us. The missed week of school following February School vacation week was very challenging in many ways, one of those has been the impact on our school calendar. I will be taking that into consideration as future weather events play out over the remainder of this winter.

That being said, so far we have had 6 days cancelled due to weather. The 180th day of school was, in the original school calendar, scheduled for June 16th. When you add the 6 days and account for the fact that school will be closed on the Juneteenth Holiday (6/19), that currently puts the last day of school as June 25th.

Let's hope that there is no more snow in the future.