Moffat County High School at night. (Max O’Neill / Craig Press)
The challenges of remote instruction has led to lower student grades this academic year at Moffat County High and Craig Middle schools, district officials say. The high school currently has 46 students in credit recovery programs at the alternative school.
Students are encouraged to attend the alternative school when they are a year behind in terms of credits earned. With an 8-to-1 student to teacher ratio and individual goals for each student to reach graduation, the alternative school can help provide more individual student instruction and guidance.
“So often those kids stay until they graduate or stay until they get caught up with their peers, whichever comes first. So, right now we have 46 kids and we’ve probably placed 20 new kids this year,” MCHS principal Sarah Hepworth said. “We generally don’t place freshmen, so those are sophomores, juniors and seniors that were behind.”
The Moffat County School Board has entered into negotiations with interim Superintendent Scott Pankow to make him the full time superintendent.
The President of the board, Jo Ann Baxter, is writing up the contract and taking the lead on negotiations with Pankow. Baxter’s goal is to get the contract signed and delivered to the school board for approval by the Jan. 28 meeting.
The negotiations were first discussed during executive session of the Dec. 10 school board meeting. The decision on whether or not to negotiate was then voted on after a motion by Vice President JoBeth Tupa, with the entire board voting “yes“, allowing for Baxter to enter into discussions with Pankow. Baxter and Pankow plan to meet on Jan. 8 to start negotiations.
Five Moffat County High School teachers are now tasked with helping 130 students learn remotely.That was part of the discussion at Thursday’s school board meeting with Moffat County High School Director of Curriculum, Zachary Allen.
He said that more than 20 students are moving from in person to Moffat County Virtual in January in the elementary school. While that number increases in the middle school to more than 25 students and 20 students in the high school. The number in the high school according to Allen that are going fully virtual are 130.
After the surprise resignation of Moffat County High School’s MoCo virtual teacher, the school district has given five already hired teachers additional stipends to help with MoCo virtual instruction, Allen saidenter the role of MoCo virtual teacher according to Allen. Each of those teachers, Joe Paddon, Amy Hansen, Todd Trapp, Krista Schenck and James Neton will work with around 25 students each.