Interim principalships: filling an 11th-hour need to buy time for a permanent successor

School Administrator, June, 2003 by Kate Beem

Eduardo Carballo was in a tight spot. It was two weeks before the start of the current school year, and Carballo, superintendent of the 7,300-student Holyoke, Mass., School District, needed an elementary school principal.

He'd followed the protocol, conducting an exhaustive national search, narrowing a field of 17 candidates to one. She'd shown up for work for just a week or so before telling Carballo she'd changed her mind and departed.

So there was Carballo, left holding the ball and desperate for an instructional leader to run Dr. Marcella R. Kelly Elementary School, a school that had seen six principals in a decade.

To solve his dilemma, Carballo embraced a remedy being used increasingly in school districts across the country: He hired an interim.

"I felt like a coach with players on the bench," Carballo says. "Who am I going to put in there right now? Where are you going to go two weeks before school starts and find somebody to put in there ?"

Common Turnover

Many of Carballo's counterparts from coast to coast can empathize with his position, Some superintendents and school boards are grappling with a teacher shortage and enrollment boom even as they're facing a dearth of educators with an ambition to become school leaders. The Chicago Public Schools, for example, began the 2002-2003 school year with about 43 interim principals and another 154 principals with contracts set to expire at year's end.

A report by the Educational Research Service estimates that 40 percent of the country's principals will retire over the next 10 years. And when those charged with hiring their successors look down the pike they don't see qualified replacements queuing up to take their places.

Often, convincing standout instructors to leave the classroom for the main office can be frustrating and fruitless. Pair that reality with the impending retirements and you've got yourself a significant gap between principal supply and demand--a phenomenon now confronting rural, suburban and urban districts. That's why 60 percent of the 853 superintendents surveyed in 2001 for the Public Agenda report "Trying to Stay Ahead of the Game" said they expect to lower their professional standards when faced with filling an open principal position.

But that doesn't have to be the case, Carballo says. Using interim principals can buy superintendents time to find a more fitting candidate. Or, as in Carballo's case, the interim might just be the one with the glass slipper.

A 4th-grade teacher turned middle school assistant principal who was completing her doctorate in education policy research and administration, Linda Carrier had helped resuscitate an ailing Holyoke middle school. Carballo liked her drive and enthusiasm, so he asked her to step in to the top spot at Dr. Marcella R. Kelly Elementary, a building with 490 students and one of the lowest-performing schools in the district, located 50 miles west of Boston.

Carrier agreed to a year, but she embraced the school as if she'd never leave. By January parent involvement had increased and the school's curriculum was being overhauled. Carrier had become a favorite among staff and families alike.

When Carballo asked Carrier to stay permanently, she said yes.

"Everybody thought she was the greatest thing," Carballo says. "I think she'll turn that school around."

Carballo was taking a chance even appointing an interim for Kelly Elementary. The last interim there, appointed before Carballo began his superintendency in December 2001, had stayed two years. Carballo thought that was too long. But he did need someone who would commit to a year, giving him a chance to look for principal candidates during the winter and spring hiring seasons.

Even as the interim principal, Carrier began to effect change. She instituted a schoolwide leadership team, a data-driven school improvement plan and new literacy and math curricula. When Carrier arrived at the school, the staff made their expectations clear, she says.

"The teachers wanted someone to stay with them and see it through," Carrier says. "1 never felt like I wasn't the principal."

An Unappealing Role

Although scant research exists documenting the increasing use of interim principals, anecdotal evidence abounds.

"I think there is a trend, but the trend is based on the difficulties in finding principals," explains Milli Pierce, director of The Principals' Center at the Harvard University Graduate School of Education. "Most districts have the best intentions. The reason they use interims is so they don't rush to use the wrong person."

Factors contributing to the principal shortage are varied. For starters, more principals are reaching retirement age, according to a staffing survey by the National Center for Education Statistics. And many aspects of the job-the long hours, the grueling pace, the relatively small pay differential between the principal and veteran teachers-aren't enticing enough educators to leave the classroom.

But over the last few decades of school reform, the role of the principal has changed. They are no longer just their buildings' instructional leaders. They're social workers, one-person human resources departments and budget officers. They must wade through labyrinthine federal rules, answer the demands of students with wide-ranging social problems and cater to the needs of their staffs and the schools' families.