Getting at the Roots of Superintendent Burnout

School Administrator, May, 1998 by Peter Bluhm

Last year, as part of a new school finance law, the Vermont legislature mandated a study of governance in Vermont schools. The legislature's interest, or at least the interest of several legislators, was to reduce the number of school districts and thereby improve efficiency.

The law misses the point. The real problem in school governance in Vermont is not our large number of districts. The real problem is administrator burnout.

Vermont's school governance system looks odd to school people from farther west. As is the case generally throughout New England, Vermont has no significant government functions performed by counties. Towns and cities therefore must provide all local services. This keeps services close at hand but can hurt efficiency.

Nearly every one of Vermont's 250 towns has a school board. Also, there are about 50 "union" districts, each of which serves several towns, typically for high school grades. Vermont thus has about 300 operating school districts, even though its total student population, 100,000, is smaller than many city school districts.

In addition, Vermont has about 60 "supervisory union" districts, the primary purpose of which is to hire a superintendent of schools. In rural areas, a superintendent typically oversees several elementary schools and a high school. Each typically is run by a separate school board.

Overwhelming Demands

The supervisory union mechanism is imperfect. Superintendents in rural areas often serve a half-dozen school districts or more. Each district typically employs and dismisses its own principal, and each votes separately on a budget and a local tax rate. Moreover, in some areas the towns within a supervisory union are economically dissimilar and have different ideas about what their children need in school.

The obvious solution is to consolidate. The Vermont legislature has found the idea alluring. Last year, several state senators proposed reducing the number of school districts to approximately 15, thereby eliminating about 95 percent of existing school districts. I believe that reducing the number of school districts would be a mistake.

Larger school districts are likely to reduce public participation in the schools and the sense of public ownership. I have served on two school boards in Vermont. First I served on the town board, which operates an elementary school for 175 students. Now I sit on a union high school board that serves students from five towns and operates a school with an enrollment of 900. I have found an enormous difference in public participation and ownership.

Our town elementary school is the focus of the community. Parents volunteer frequently for after-school sports and clubs, and many parents are actively involved with teachers in supplementing education, both in the classroom and at home. The union school cannot lay claim to anything like this level of participation. Certainly there are inherent differences between a K-6 school and a 7-12 school, but there is also a strong public feeling that the town school is "our school" and needs our support.

Reducing the number of districts won't necessarily save money. Certainly there would be fewer officials carrying the title of superintendent if Vermont had 15 school districts instead of 60 supervisory unions and 300 school districts. But it isn't at all clear there would be fewer administrators, Indeed, larger cities in other states often have many assistant superintendents who perform the same functions as Vermont superintendents. Eliminating districts may produce little more than new titles for the same people doing the same work.

Guaranteed Burnout

On the other hand, school boards cannot ignore existing problems. By all accounts, one serious problem in Vermont schools is a high turnover rate. Annually, about 30 percent of superintendencies become vacant. Several districts each year have extended periods when they operate without a superintendent at all.

A high turnover rate is more than an annoyance, it is a serious barrier to effective school management. We cannot have a third of our managers in trainee status each year and expect to accomplish much. A Vermont superintendent can spend a year learning the job, a second year beginning to organize his or her program and a third year looking for the next job.

Our system makes being a superintendent a burnout job for most people. Until recently, my own supervisory union expected the superintendent to attend a minimum of eight routine school board meetings per month. In addition, the superintendent was expected to offer informed advice to 32 individual board members on any and all issues, to know the budgets and financial condition of six districts, to serve as the chief planner for any construction projects, to mediate conflicts between boards and principals, to deal with grievances and negotiations, to cancel school in bad weather, to oversee contracts for busing and for milk and (oh, by the way) to be the educational leader of the district.

Even if all of this were possible--and it isn't--the superintendent gets the added challenge of automatically being in the middle whenever any two of the six district boards have a policy conflict.