Superintendent: Most Challenging, Rewarding Year

Dorchester School District Two Superintendent Joe Pye's presentation title for his annual state of the district said it all: "Points of Pride." 

Pye highlighted nearly 70 points of pride during the presentation to the school board Monday night. These can be seen in entirety attached to this article.

"It's been a wonderful year," Pye said as he introduced his topic. "This has been the most challenging year of my entire 40-year career — most challenging. I'm not a quitter because, first of this year, I would have been gone."

And he wasn't even sure there would be much to be proud of this year.

"We came up with these goals and, I thought to myself, these are so lofty they will not be achieved," Pye said. Then he added the district schools not only met the goals, they have also exceeded them in some instances.

He accredited the great year to great students and great staff.

"We finally had it right; we have strong teams," Pye said. "We're moving together as a united front."

This past school year the district faced large class sizes and under-staffing issues.

"It's like playing a football game where you'd like to have 11 on the field and another 50 ready to refresh the team, but we have seven on the field and no one to refresh," Pye said.  

One area of major accomplishment was math scores.

"Math scores in every grade level is up ... I'm talking about phenomenal numbers in our schools," Pye said.

And this year, instead of hounding below-average schools on what they've done wrong, Pye has decided to hound the above-average schools on what they've done right.

"We're going to pick out the success stories," Pye said. He added that the last 12 years have been failure stories. "I've decided it's time to butter the bread with the top grade butter … I want to reward them, and I want to use them as models."

He said much of the success is due to new programs in the schools, like and .

"It snowed last year, and I'm happy to report it stuck," Pye said of the success-under-tribulations in the district.