Superintendent's Message
Marc J. Smith - Dennis-Yarmouth Regional Schools
Next Year's School District Budget
Hello Dolphin Community,
At our last School Committee meeting, the Committee ask me to prepare a presentation for them for the upcoming meeting this Monday (4/29/24). At this point, the School Committee has approved it's budget. As I have previously mentioned, the School Committee's budget includes a little over $2 million in staffing reductions in order to ensure we can present a reasonable budget increase to the two towns. We have done this in a thoughtful way that we do not believe will impact educational programming for students next year. This approved budget will still require some action in both towns. In Dennis, the Select Board and Finance Committee have voted to "raise and appropriate from available funds" all the funds necessary for the school budget. This means they will not seek an override from the voters. The school budget will still need to pass a vote at town meeting in Dennis (May 7). In Yarmouth, the Select Board and Finance Committee have allocated some additional funds to the school budget and will be seeking an $880,000 override from voters. The override needs to pass two stages. It needs to pass at Town meeting (April 30) and on a ballot at the Town election on May 21. Yarmouth and Dennis families are encourage to make sure their voices are included in these decisions by attending Town Meetings and voting on election days.
The presentation the Committee asked me to prepare for this coming Monday addresses the question "What if the override does not pass in Yarmouth?" It is important that we begin to start to plan for the possibility that an override may not pass and additional cuts to the school program may be necessary. As a result, we have begun some initial planning on developing options around what that might look like should the override not pass. As I mentioned in my last message, if the override does not pass, we will need to lower the assessment to Yarmouth by $880,000. We can not lower the assessment to Yarmouth without proportionally reducing the assessment to Dennis as well. The assessment proportion between the two towns is roughly 30% Dennis and 70% Yarmouth. Therefore, in order to reduce the Yarmouth assessment by $880,000 we would need to reduce the Dennis assessment $393,000 for a total budget reduction of $1,273,000. I will be presenting the presentation linked here to the School Committee on Monday. It presents three "early options" for additional ways that we might cut an additional almost $1.3 million from the budget. These cuts will likely have a significant negative impact on our school programming as they require us to cut an additional 18-22 positions over the 35.5 we have already cut for next year. I have tried to preliminarily outline what some of those impacts may look like in the presentation for the Committee as well.
If you have any questions regarding the school district's budget, please feel free to reach out to us here at Central Office.
All the best,
Marc J. Smith, Ed. D.
Superintendent