Letter: Moss standard lowers the bar

Perhaps the part where Superintendent Jeff Moss did some really good work slipped my notice. Here’s what I recall from his recent performance:

He presided over an under-performing school system, with abysmally low teacher retention.

He invented a district-level position for his wife, which included a salary of more than $90,000 (nearly three times the salary of a young teacher in his district). It resulted in a series of nepotism charges. She resigned.

After Hurricane Matthew, Moss publicly announced his revision to the school calendar. Strangely, he failed to get board approval before announcing his decision. Three hasty, ill-conceived, and very public calendar revisions followed.

Still, the school board recently assessed Moss’s performance and found it to be “proficient.” Or, in the parlance of our schools, they gave Moss a passing grade. Fantastically, they also gave him a $33,000 bonus, on top of his $220,000 salary. Moss will now make seven times the salary of my child’s classroom teacher.

Perhaps more salient, the board’s latest decision assigned a passing grade to a man who is overwhelmingly perceived to have performed well below expectations. What message does this convey to the thousands of students and teachers who work and learn under Moss’s purported leadership? Given the new “Moss Proficiency Standard,” it is difficult to imagine any performance by any student or teacher anywhere in the county that would not pass muster.

Sadly, the school board’s evaluation of Moss has dramatically lowered the bar for everyone associated with the Beaufort County School District.

This story was originally published December 22, 2016 at 3:29 PM with the headline "Letter: Moss standard lowers the bar."