- Message to the Families September 25, 2026 in English
- Message to the Families September 25, 2026 in Spanish
Saludos Lawrence Public Schools families.
This week, as it does every fall, the Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) released 2026 assessment and accountability results, including MCAS.
These annual tests remain an important part of determining how schools, districts and individual students are doing. This year, we are also able to share an exciting new tool for accessing, reviewing and understanding the information that we know matters most to each of you – your child’s results.
For the first time, families can see their child’s individual results online through DESE’s MCAS Family Portal. It will provide results from the MCAS tests they took last spring, as well as those from previous years.
If your child was in one of the tested grades last year (grades 3-8 and 10), you will receive information from your child’s school in the next week or so about how to access the portal using a registration code that is unique to each student.
You can learn more about the new MCAS Family Portal and find bilingual tools at DESE’s Family Portal web page, including a step-by-step guide and video. But please remember you will need your child’s registration code – coming soon from your school – to log in. Traditional paper copies will also still be sent home as well.
We encourage you to review your child’s results, recognizing they are just one piece of the much bigger picture that makes up any child’s education, but can help identify areas of strength, growth, and where help is needed.
Similarly for Lawrence Public Schools, we are exploring what the data tells us as a district and how it should guide us moving forward. As with every year, 2026 brought bright spots, including one of the highest graduation rate increases in Massachusetts and encouraging progress toward English proficiency for our English Learners. Overall, however, it is clear how much work we still have to do, with achievement levels that remained mostly steady but concerningly low.
Additionally, we were unable to maintain the strong attendance gains of the past several years, seeing a slight increase in chronic absenteeism for the first time since 2022. As you know this has been an area of great emphasis for LPS and myself, and you can expect us to bring a renewed sense of urgency to our partnership with parents and caregivers in ensuring students know that every day counts.
We look forward to sharing more detailed information as we dive deeper into our data, and hope you will take the opportunity to do the same with your child’s results through DESE’s Family Portal.
Thank you for helping us get off to a strong start to the school year, and have a good weekend.
Respectfully,
Ralph Carrero
Superintendent
Lawrence Public Schools
