Back to the Trenches - school superintendents who choose lower-profile positions in school administration

School Administrator, March, 1996 by Krista Ramsey

Before school began the next fall, an elementary school ceiling crashed from one end of a hallway to the other, but the 9-mill bond issue proposed by the new superintendent crashed, too, attracting only 30 percent of the vote.

Scriber is convinced he made the right decision to leave.

Caught Unprepared

Even well-seasoned administrators find they sometimes are unprepared for the rigors of the superintendency. Withee, once the schools chief in Southgate, Mich., entered the superintendency with enthusiasm and a well-ordered plan for improving the schools in his district. Less than four years later, he requested reassignment as an elementary principal.

Withee thought he understood the demands. He had served as assistant superintendent in the same district for eight years. What he didn't foresee was being consumed by budget and labor issues and having his schedule taken over by meetings with consultants, committees, and the public "without any evidence of conclusion of any of the issues.

He was caught off-guard by how removed he felt from the daily workings of education. That fact still surprises him.

"For eight years, I sat one seat away from the hot seat and still I didn't see what it was really like," Withee admits.

He believes administrators considering the top job need an intensive introduction to its pressures and complications and a game plan to cope with them since "the most stressful things about the job are just built into it and aren't going away, he says.

Calling Timeout

That's the reason Dust, of the Indiana superintendents' association, believes the only way to retain promising young superintendents is to offer them sabbaticals early in their careers.

"Generally, when they make the decision to step back, they're coming off years of highly intense pressure," he says. "They still want to contribute at that level, but they wake up and realize they've lost their vision. A sabbatical gives them a way to step back in."

It also offers a timeout to deal with the personal issues that arise out of professional pressures--issues that many exiting superintendents say the profession has ignored for too long.

In AASA's 1992 Study of the American School Superintendency, more than half the superintendents under age 50 said the job caused them considerable or very great stress. Of all superintendents surveyed, 8 percent said family concerns drove them from the job.

William Drury, an education professor at University of Dayton, says candidates for superintendencies ought to consider realistically the job's likely toll on family life, missed activities, the criticism they and their families will endure, and family relocations. Drury, a former superintendent who once did a stretch of 54 consecutive evenings on the job, says the profession has ignored these problems for too long.

The day Al Osborne realized how far job frustrations had spilled over into his personal life was the day he decided to leave the superintendency.

"I found myself looking face to face with my son. I had grabbed my 9-year-old with both hands and lifted him up in the air, over a relatively little thing," he remembers. "It embarrassed me. It scared me. I thought, 'Fool, what are you doing to yourself?'