Hello Dolphin Community,

I hope this message finds everyone well and enjoying their summer. While most of our students have not been with us in our schools, there has been plenty going on over the past month or so throughout the district. Much of the deep summer cleaning has been completed in the schools and now they are beginning to receive their supply orders to ensure a successful start to the school year (like this delivery pictured to the left of our new ELA Curriculum to the Station Avenue Elementary School). Additionally, the School Committee approved the use of some of it's Excess and Deficiency funds (similar to Free Cash) to fund facilities improvement projects across the district. These are a part of the district's newly adopted 5 year capital plan (a key objective in our strategic plan) to ensure our schools are safe, secure, and healthy for our students and staff for years to come. Many of these projects have been occurring over the summer including the gymnasium and fire control panels at DYHS, upgrades to our security access system, and upgrades to heating systems.

Additionally, there are still many students attending school and our AlphaBest care program in locations throughout the district. It is great to see activity in the Intermediate-Middle School as well as the High School. As I have said before, school buildings are just not the same without children in them. School and district leaders have been working to prepare for student and staff return in a few weeks. All leaders will meet again next week for a couple days of planning to finalize next year's action planning for the strategic plan, get some professional development, set goals for curriculum implementation, and other district/school alignment to ensure that we are one pod of Dolphins all moving in the same direction.

All staff will be back in the district for Convocation on September 1st and the first day for students is Wednesday, September 9th. Please be on the look out over the next few weeks for information from the schools/district including teacher assignments/schedules as well as the bus lists. We anticipate some decent sized changes to the bus stops this year as we are building the stops around the transportation survey and designing "cluster stops" so be sure to look closely when that comes out.

Thank you for your ongoing support,

Marc J. Smith, Ed.D

Superintendent