VISTA, Calif -- As many as 20 of the 24 teachers at Maryland Elementary have asked to leave the Vista school if the current principal remains, it was reported Friday.

The teachers, who have all put in transfer requests over the last several weeks, say Maryland Principal Acacia Thede is authoritarian and inexperienced, The North County Times reported.

Jan O'Reilly, president of the Vista Teachers Association, told the newspaper that problems at Maryland started last year when Thede shifted more than half of the school's teachers to a different grade level.

"You just don't do those kind of things," O'Reilly told the Times.

In March, all but one teacher at Maryland voted their lack of confidence in Thede after a survey showed teachers were unhappy with the direction in which the school was headed, according to the Times.

But Jane Gomez, president of the school's parent-teacher association, thinks Thede is a great principal.

Gomez told the Times the teachers may not like Thede because she is holding them more accountable than former principal Hector Menchaca.

Several of the teachers followed Menchaca in 2006 when he left Olive Elementary to open Maryland, which is in an older neighborhood of northwestern Vista and has the lowest test scores of any elementary school in the Vista Unified School District.

Thede, who is on maternity leave until the end of the school year, declined to comment on the transfer requests. It was not immediately clear whether any of them would be approved, according to the Times.