Stowe schools inch toward new grading system

The next order of business is to develop what report cards will look like in a proficiency-based system.

The Stowe School Board spent its meeting Monday night looking at state laws that affect schools, from the 2014 push to move to a proficiency-based learning system to this year’s drive to find efficiencies in health care costs.

First up: the grading system in a proficiency-based system.

In the past, schools gauged proficiency by how many facts a student could remember and regurgitate on an exam.

Not anymore. The new system moves away from grades and test scores to tailoring education to individual needs, skills and interests.

The goal is to move students away from thinking an A is proficient and an F is failing, and move them on to a 1 through 5 grading scale.

“We don’t want to create any analogies with the old system and the new system,” Val Sullivan, curriculum director for the Lamoille South Supervisory Union. “A 5 is not an A, and a 3 is not a B. It’s a completely different system.”

And a 1 does not mean that a student is failing.

“It’s like watching a plant grow,” said board member Jim Brochhausen. “A seed is where you are supposed to be at the beginning, and when it blooms, it’s a proficiency-based plant. It’s about evolution, the journey. Mid-plant growth doesn’t mean a C. It’s proficient for the middle part of the year.”

There won’t be any 2.5’s or 4.9’s either. Student grades will be marked only as whole numbers on the scale, without any in-betweens.

“The scale is not gradated or nuanced,” said Tracy Wrend, the school superintendent. “Each piece of evidence will suggest where the students are within the scale more than a micro-scale would.”

“The more precise and the more gradation on the scale, the more arbitrary the numbers become,” said board member Emily Rosenbaum, offering an analogy to her kids leaving dirty socks on the floor. Evidence can be collected daily on where they leave them in relation to the laundry basket and inform a decision on where each family member would fall on a 1-5 scale. One day, they may be a 1 and the next a 3, so on the whole they’d be in the range of 2 for proficiency.

Board member Cara Zimmerman said the concern in the community is what happens when kids compare themselves to other students.

“What happens when you are so close to a 4, but still show a 3 on the scale?” Zimmerman said.

The system’s not perfect, Sullivan said, and students will still have a grade-point average.

Lamoille South is still working on what its report cards will look like. It has bought a system called Alpine Achievement, which keeps all student data — from test scores to assignments — in one place, and runs an analysis on each piece of evidence to inform teachers, students and parents of where their students are in the grade scale.

In the end, these reports will probably serve as the report cards, but not for a while.

Vermont schools are slowly moving toward a system where there won’t be a first grade or a 12th grade. Education will be about the growth of a student, and some may finish school sooner than others.

“In the current system, it’s like a sell-by date on a carton of milk. We expect kids to all have an epiphany and move on to the next grade on the same day,” Sullivan said. “It doesn’t work like that.”

During in-service next week, staff and faculty members will focus on reporting. Through the year, they will work their way through complete development of the proficiency-based system with regular updates to the public. The system has to be fully implemented for the class of 2020, which enters its sophomore year in a couple of weeks.

Health care

In June, a compromise on public school teachers’ health care may have helped avoid a government shutdown, but it’s likely to make Vermont school budgets more difficult to craft.

Gov. Phil Scott hoped a change in health care would save $75 million a year — putting $49 million into reducing out-of-pocket expenses for teachers and retaining $26 million for other purposes.

In part, legislators balked because Scott wanted to shift health care bargaining to the state level, rather than keep it local.

The compromise, keeping negotiations local, will reduce state payments to local school districts by $13 million — the amount they would have saved by moving to the health care plan Scott had called for.

If school districts could not negotiate an 80/20 split on health premiums with the local teachers’ union, they will have to cut their budgets elsewhere.

The new plan took effect July 1, and gives school districts a two-year window to absorb the cuts — $8.5 million in the first year and $4.5 million the next — partially because the new health plans won’t kick in until Jan. 1.

Lamoille South negotiated a plan close to that benchmark, offering an 86 percent employer contribution and 14 percent employee contribution for the first year, and an 85/15 split the second year. However, its health reimbursement account contributions are lower than the state benchmark, which Wrend thinks should even it out.

“We are estimating a holdback range from $200,000 to zero for (fiscal year 2018), and $110,000 to zero for FY19 depending on the formula used and interpretation of the law,” Wrend said Monday.

“I think we can realize half of the $200,000 from health care savings. If that’s what comes to be, we’ll have to make it up somewhere else.”

The amounts to be held back from each district were finalized by the Vermont tax department and the Department of Education on Tuesday, and they are within the range Wrend predicted.

In the 2017-18 school year, $55,685 will be recaptured from Elmore-Morristown School District and $50,762 from Stowe, for a total of $106,447 to be withheld from the supervisory union as a whole.

For the 2018-19 school year, the amounts are $29,984 and $27,333 for Elmore-Morristown and Stowe, respectively.