Unfair targets: superintendents' offspring: school-age children cope with exaggerated expectations and hurtful criticism because of their unique status

School Administrator, Feb, 2005 by Kate Beem

Most people think the children of American presidents live under a microscope.

But at least they have Secret Service agents and a cadre of other adults shielding them from the glare of the public eye.

Superintendents' school-age children have no such luxuries. Just ask Sarah and Leah Boniface.

Now 20-year-old college sophomores, the twins entered high school the year their mother, Rose Marie Boniface, took over the top job in the Marlborough, Mass., school district. Although they already were students in the 5,000-student district 26 miles west of Boston, where their mother has spent her entire career, attitudes toward them changed once they were perceived as children of privilege.

Overnight, it seemed, the expectations teachers held of Boniface's daughters escalated. People assumed they should perform better academically merely because their mother was the superintendent. "It was difficult for them," says Boniface, 55. "Clearly that became apparent to me early on."

The Boniface girls weren't anticipating that change or another, more bothersome, transformation. In an instant, students and teachers alike saw them as conduits of information to their mother. If she failed to call off school when it snowed, Sarah and Leah took the brunt. If a teacher had a bone to pick with Boniface, he or she sometimes rode the twins harder than the other students, they said. The girls hardly ever received invitations to big parties either--something they chalked up to their peers worrying they'd tattle on any wrongdoing.

And always they felt they had to work a little harder than everyone else to live up to an unstated expectation of perfection, says Sarah Boniface, now a student, along with Leah, at Regis College in Weston, Mass. "I thought we had to try extra hard to prove ourselves in school."

The low point came one snowy afternoon as the Boniface girls made their way to their car in the parking lot at Marlborough High School. Members of the school's ice hockey team, angry with the superintendent after she punished team members for breaking a school district rule, attacked the twins with snowballs.

Angry and frightened, they retreated to the school office.

Celebrity Phenomenon

When Rose Marie Boniface talks about those times, her voice is full of remorse. It's still painful to think those things happened to her girls in the district where she's worked for 34 years. Yet unpleasantness aside, the girls never seriously wished another career upon their mother, they said.

"She apologized to us," Sarah Boniface says. "I know she felt bad about it, but we were proud of her for having that position. We wouldn't have wanted her not to do the job because of us."

Such is the lot of many superintendents' school-age children. They are proud of the important role their parents play in the life of their schools while yearning to be just like the other children.

To be sure, growing up the child of a school superintendent has its upsides. There are certain perks, such as never having to worry when you forget your lunch money and having your parent hand you your high school diploma. But there's plenty of pressure, both internally and externally, to act just right so as never to draw undue attention to the family.

The children of school superintendents are not unlike those of politicians or other celebrities, psychologist Charles Figley says. If the word "celebrity" means someone well-known and powerful within a community, then superintendents certainly fit the bill.

"It's a powerful position," says Figley, who has studied the stress levels of celebrity families, focusing on how those families deal with the loss of privacy. "They make decisions every day that affect people's lives."

And like the offspring of Hollywood celebrities or Washington politicians, the children of school superintendents are, within the school community, rarely judged on their own merits, perceived instead as walking, talking visual aides representing their parents' agenda, says Figley, founder and director of the Florida State University Traumatology Institute.

Identity Search

It can be especially hard for children. What adults can endure differs from that of their children. Rose Marie Boniface, for example, loathes shopping in Marlborough. Even the simplest trip to the grocery takes two or three times as long as it should because school district patrons constantly stop Boniface and expect her to chat about school matters. As a result, she shops in nearby towns whenever she can.

But for superintendents' children, solving the problem isn't as simple as choosing another school. They have to live with the hand they're dealt, bumbling along, making the same goofy choices as other children their age but often held up to ridicule when they make mistakes. And when they do err, they can wobble under the weight of their guilt, which not only makes their own lives miserable, but also their parents' lives, Figley says.

The major job of most children is searching for their own identities. But for many children of celebrities, their identity is so closely tied to their parents' that they can't easily break out of the mold. "It's growing up in a glass house," he says. "There are many more consequences to normal behavior."