News Releases

The Dubuque Community School District has been awarded a Certificate of Excellence in Financial Reporting from the Association of School Business Officials (ASBO) International for having met or exceeded the program’s high standards for financial reporting and accountability. The award is for the district’s Comprehensive Annual Financial Report for the fiscal year ending in 2014.

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Dubuque Senior High School will unexpectedly become the first school in the district to implement the district’s new phone system following a lightning strike that took down the first system. The transition will take place this weekend.

The district was scheduled to begin implementation of the new system on September 28 in one of the district’s smaller elementary schools. After determining that the current equipment at Senior (scheduled to be placed in a matter of months anyway) would be costly to repair, staff instead began preparing to move directly into the new system to restore phone service in the building.

District technology staff will be working with Heartland Systems, the firm helping manage migration to the new system, to get Senior up-and-running on the new system this weekend.

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Due to the forecast for excessive heat, combined with heat build-up in schools, the Dubuque Community School District will operate on a two-hour early release tomorrow, Friday, September 4. Afternoon preschool will be canceled. Temperatures in some district classrooms today reached heat-index values of over 105 degrees.

After carefully considering all scheduling options, and realizing that families and childcare providers have already made Friday morning arrangements, tomorrow’s late arrival will be held as scheduled. As a reminder, this means school will start one-hour later than the Monday through Thursday start time.

In the past, it would not have been possible to have both a late start and early release because the time would not have counted as a school day. Now that the district tracks time in hours, tomorrow’s time will still count toward completion of the school year. Know that our building teams will work to ensure that this shortened day is still an educationally valuable one.

Due to the forecast for excessive heat combined with heat build-up in schools, the Dubuque Community School District will operate on a two-hour early release today, Thursday, September 3, 2015.

Afternoon preschool will be canceled. All middle school practices will also be canceled. High school athletes will receive more information from their coaches about rescheduled practice times, if necessary.

Hempstead High School was recently named recipient of the Iowa Award for Excellence in Recycling (Best School Recycling Program) given by the Iowa Recycling Association. Representatives from Hempstead’s Green Team received the award on July 23 at the association’s annual luncheon. The group was nominated for the award by Bev Wagner, education coordinator for the Dubuque Metropolitan Area Solid Waste Agency, who was also named the state’s Recycler of the Year at the event.

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Through a generous donation to the Dubuque Community School District, John and Alice Butler are funding the replacement and renovation of windows and doors at Bryant Elementary School to return them to their appropriate historic style. In addition, the project will include new historical exterior lighting at the school. Cost of the project, and amount of the donation, is $780,000.

Work is underway and the progress so far is amazing. View photos from ongoing renovation.

Students in the Dubuque Community School District who worked with reading tutors from the AmeriCorps Partners in Learning program built relationships and worked hard to improve their reading proficiency. Looking back on their work over the last school year, the results show a positive impact on reading proficiency.

According to results of the DIBELS assessment, 67 percent of students who worked with an AmeriCorps member 30 times or more over the course of the 2014-2015 school year increased their composite reading score. Attendance was also positively impacted through the AmeriCorps mentoring, with 96 percent of the same students attending school at a 90 percent or greater attendance rate.

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The Dubuque Community School District was recently recognized for its communication efforts at both the national and state level.

At the national level, the district was recognized by the National School Public Relations Association (NSPRA) with an Award of Merit for an episode of the District-Wide Update produced by the district. The award was part of NSPRA’s Publications and Electronic Media Awards, which recognize outstanding education communication materials.

The district also received three national awards in the 2015 Hometown Media Awards including the award for Overall Excellence in Educational Programming (for budgets under $300,000). The district also received the award for Best Web-Based Program for the Roosevelt Middle School Orientation video and an honorable mention in the Magazine Show category for the District-Wide Update. This national awards program for cable access programming is sponsored by the Alliance for Community Media, an organization committed to promoting civic engagement through community media.

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