A northern Vermont principal has abruptly resigned amid growing community frustrations about the school’s switch to proficiency-based grading.
Chris Mosca, who was in his seventh year leading BFA-St. Albans, announced Tuesday in an email to students he would be stepping down. His last day at the school was Wednesday.
Parents – particularly those with seniors looking at fast-approaching college application deadlines – have been up in arms about problems with the high school’s transcripts. Students have received several versions of their transcripts this fall – one of which ran six pages long – often with errors.
In an interview, Mosca said he was stepping down in large part to spend time with family. The administrator has been commuting from Augusta, Maine, and he said the six-hour drive each way had been wearing on him. But he acknowledged the transcript debacle had played into his decision to leave.
“Certainly that’s been a challenge,” he said.
Maple Run Unified School District Superintendent Kevin Dirth said Thursday evening that all seniors finally had accurate, user-friendly transcripts. But he said there was “no excuse” for the delays and problems along the way.
“We should have gotten it right. And I’m disturbed about that. And as a superintendent, I take responsibility,” he said.
Dirth declined to elaborate on Mosca’s resignation beyond what the principal had disclosed publicly. Bill Kimball, Maple Run’s newly hired assistant superintendent, will take over for Mosca until the district can make a more permanent hire, he said. Kimball was superintendent of Washington Central Supervisory Union from 2012 until June.
Proficiency-based learning is supposed to represent a profound change in teaching and learning. Schools can offer opportunities to retake tests, and grading is supposed to be tied to highly granular standards — not to how well others perform. The idea to move schools away from a system where learning is measured based on the amount of time a student spends in a classroom.
State rules require the class of 2020 to graduate based on proficiency measures, but Education Secretary Dan French has said he isn’t approaching the deadline as a “hard and fast” rule.
The transition to proficiency-based learning in Vermont has been bumpy. While some schools have embraced the change, other districts have been beset with administrative snafus and community pushback. A statewide union survey conducted earlier this year found widespread dissatisfaction with the guidance and training educators had been given to implement the new approach.
Vermont’s pivot to proficiency-based learning was part of larger set of reforms intended to make learning more student-centered, individualized, and project-based. But the mandates came with little state support, and schools have been left mostly to their own devices to create new systems.
“This was a transformative act of legislation that really required a significant amount of resources to make sure it was done properly,” Mosca said.
The state doesn’t actually require schools to change their grading rubrics as they adopt a proficiency approach, but many districts have opted to do so. For many schools, the new grading system has been difficult to implement. Parents balk at multi-page report cards and teachers complain that the administrative headaches of overhauling grading systems are distracting from valuable changes in pedagogy.
“I think a lot of work that our teachers did was terrific. The trouble came with the scoring, recording, and reporting,” Mosca said.
