IMPACT: Superintendents talk pressures, changes to jobDate: 8/21/2023 It’s been a rough year for superintendents and school districts in Western Massachusetts, with high turnover, difficulty filling positions, and more districts opting to hire interim superintendents as they struggle to recover from the learning loss caused by the COVID-19 shutdown.
Stefan Czaporowski is entering his ninth year as superintendent in Westfield, after serving as principal at Westfield Technical Academy for four years. Before that, he has been a principal, assistant principal, social studies supervisor and teacher, all in Massachusetts school districts.
Czaporowski said the job of superintendent is becoming overwhelming between the demands of the state, staff shortages, navigating communities, the number of complaints and trying to “do what’s best for our kids at the same time.”
Despite the difficulties, the job remains both challenging and satisfying for many area superintendents.
Thomas Scott, co-executive director of the Massachusetts Association for School Superintendents, said there are several factors contributing to a high turnover in superintendents.
“There’s a lot of turnover. There are 275 superintendents in the commonwealth, with a turnover of 15% to 20% a year,” Scott said. Currently, in the state, there are 35 superintendents new to the position, and 18 who have shifted districts.
Scott said there are also many more interim superintendents than five or 10 years ago, because the pool of superintendents is smaller. Some districts hire an interim when they plan to conduct a search at a more optimal time in the calendar.
“We see an increase [of hiring] from within the district. If you have good strong leadership in the community — a principal, or assistant superintendent — communities would be wise to nurture that leadership,” he said.
Scott said the Massachusetts Association of School Superintendents took a survey eight years ago, asking its members if they had it to do all over again, would they pursue being a superintendent. He said 85% said yes. When asked, Scott conceded it might be worthwhile doing the survey again now, after the COVID-19 emergency.
Superintendents talk about changes in the job
John Provost, who is beginning his 13th year as a superintendent, is entering his second year in the Hampden-Wilbraham Regional School District. Previously, he served as superintendent in Northampton for eight years, and before that, in North Brookfield.
Provost said he has seen changes in the job over the last 13 years.
“I think of the superintendent as the person charged with making sure that everyone in the district, students and staff alike are growing, becoming wiser, healthier and freer. In the time I have been a superintendent I have seen the focus of the work shift from being nearly exclusively focused on the intellectual growth of the school community to being equally focused on the intellectual and emotional needs of students and staff, as people have struggled to maintain the human connections that we all need to learn and perform at our best,” Provost said.
Anne McKenzie, who is in her 10th year as superintendent of Hadley Public Schools, came to the job after serving as executive director of the Lower Pioneer Valley Educational Collaborative for eight years.
McKenzie said she sees the job of superintendent as an opportunity to serve others. “I frequently refer to the central office as the central services agency,” she said.
She said she doesn’t believe the job has changed, and what she’s always done, she is still doing. “Not my experience. The tougher the times, the more opportunity to be of service,” she said.
“This role affords me opportunities to work with staff, students, families, and our school committee to design fun, challenging, and exciting learning experiences; create spaces and classroom/school climates where every person is seen, valued, heard, appreciated, and respected; be a resource and support for families when they need it; and encourage people who are doing some of the most important and valuable work in our society — contributing to the education of young people,” McKenzie said.
Financial pressures
Scott said one reason for the high turnover is due to the current political and social climate. Local school districts expend the majority of the funding in a community, and consequently, they are under greater scrutiny about how the dollars are spent, and must be accountable to the community.
Added to that, school districts are a melting pot of a lot of different issues in a political environment that is very toxic. Scott said the diversity and inclusion issues in the community and among the students in the district precipitate a lot of different emotions and feelings.
“It becomes a lightning rod in some communities how the superintendent and district deal with those issues,” he said.
Provost talked about the challenge of financial pressures.
“There always seems to be a gap between the resources needed to optimally serve students as we would like to and the funding available for public schools. Finding a way to provide a high-quality education while remaining within a relatively constrained budget is always a challenge,” Provost said.
Kristen Smidy, who has just completed her second year as superintendent at Gateway Regional, came to the position after a decade serving as principal of Hampshire Regional High School and Middle School, and assistant principal in the middle school. She started her career teaching middle school history in Springfield.
Smidy described her job as focusing on the kids, on the academics, on what the kids need; working with the community and the School Committee, really listening and responding to people’s priorities and needs, and understanding the obligations of the state.
“My job is to really listen, take it in and respond accordingly,” she said.
Smidy said superintendents are under “a ton” of pressure about money, especially with an end in sight for Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, a pandemic-related federal aid fund, especially for small districts such as Gateway that did not receive the increase in Student Opportunity Act funds that many cities did.
“The school budget takes up 50 to 60 (or more) percent of a lot of these small town budgets. In my role, we’re advised to advocate for the district. I’ve tried to partner with the communities. The community appreciates it,” she said.
COVID-19 impact
“Since COVID, it’s a pretty dysregulated environment, and we have not come out of that. What we see in kids and adults, the normalcy of how they communicate and react with each other is not what we’ve seen prior to COVID,” Scott said.
Sheila Hoffman, who took the job as superintendent in Agawam Public Schools in December 2020 after serving several months as interim superintendent, said she started in the middle of the COVID-19 shutdown.
“A whole group of us we call ‘COVID superintendents’ because we all started in July 2020. We talk about it informally at Mass. Association of School Superintendents meetings. Quite a few of them started in July 2020.”
“The first two years of my job were nothing [like] what a superintendent did previously,” Hoffman said.
She said the job refocused on operational safety, safety concerns for staff and students, and mental health, wellbeing and physical safety because of the virus — “A lot of things that have never been done before in schools.” Hoffman said this past year was the first year the district returned to the core of instruction and learning.
Czaporowski believes a lot of the changes in the job came during COVID-19, with people taking opposite sides on issues, like masks or no masks. “Superintendents are going to implement state standards — they’re 50% of the budget. We have to follow state mandates, but sometimes that creates conflicts with members of the community.” He said those conflicts place superintendents between “a rock and a hard place.”
He said since the start of the coronavirus pandemic, the time demands on the job of superintendent have also increased.
“Before COVID, we had boundaries. Now it’s a 24/7 position,” he said. Czaporowski said during the pandemic shutdowns, the Westfield School Committee met 59 times, whereas normally it “would be lucky” to have 20 meetings in a year.
Czaporowski said there is also a gap between the learning loss students experienced during COVID-19 and society’s expectations. “Everyone wants immediate turnaround and recovery,” he said. He believes between the mental health and social emotional issues and the learning gaps, “It’s going to take 10 years to get back to where we were.”
Czaporowski said it would help for the Department of Education to give districts more time to recover. He said state Sen. John Velis is trying to address some of the mental health concerns, and he believes that addressing behavior issues and students not coming to school ready to learn has to be a priority.
Provost said it’s a very difficult job with long hours and tremendous challenges. “Although I’ve tried to avoid talking about it, COVID definitely had an impact. That has impacted people in their own personal lives, and superintendents in their professional lives, and has a lot to do with the turnover. It always was a position with a lot of turnover — in the past 5 years, that process of turnover has accelerated.”
Social Media
Larkham said with the mental health challenges that are being discussed nationally, what she is wrestling with is not only the connections to COVID-19 but to social media.
“We say COVID as a kind of a catch-all that turned into a perfect storm for young people. How much more time were students spending on social media? For one, they were isolated, due to social distancing recommendations,” McKenzie said.
“If we keep pointing solely to COVID, we’re putting the emphasis on the wrong syllable. I fear that some of the habits we developed then might actually be contributing much more. We can’t recover from something that we aren’t even trying to stop.”
McKenzie believes it is important that students wrestle with things, their meaning and purpose. She said the challenge will be “predicting the impact of rapidly changing technologies and how best to prepare students for the intellectual and ethical demands of interacting with these technologies in ways that are productive, healthy, wise, and benefit society.”
Smidy also believes that social media is contributing to the problems.
“Resilience comes from persevering through obstacles and challenges. Social media is contributing to the perception that everyone else’s life is perfect,” she said. She worries that kids are looking for validation from their interactions on social media, which are often false and fabricated.
Hoffman said that the new technology and tools that were developed during the COVID-19 shutdown will help with planning for teachers and provide more opportunities for students; what she calls “learning to bring us into the next two years.”
“What we learned through COVID-19 are things that we’re trying to leverage now, to make changes, and not sliding back. I think teachers have done a really nice job balancing that; using them as tools in the classroom but not the only tool, with a focus on relationship building — using different ways to deliver content,” Hoffman said.
Job satisfaction
Scott, who previously served as a superintendent in the eastern Massachusetts communities of Concord and Carlisle for 11 years, said he still hears from “an awful lot” of people who find the job challenging but very satisfying.
“When you do the work and you see the good things that come as a result of that, there is a lot of satisfaction. There are people who want to tackle complex issues,” Scott said, adding that a lot of superintendents have previously gone through the ranks as teachers and principals. “They’re ready for taking on that challenge.”
Despite the pressures, Smidy said she is enjoying the job. “The job is hard. I am enjoying it. I feel really fortunate to be in this community,” she said.
Hoffman grew up in Agawam and went through the schools there. She said as a superintendent in her hometown, it makes her deeply committed to the work. Her friends, the people she went to school with who stayed in Agawam, are raising their children, who are in the schools right now. She said she will be making sure they are given all the tools to be successful.
“I am very excited to start a new school year, happy to be in the community I grew up in and committed to the work and the people,” she said.
“As superintendent, I have the ability to guide the education of students throughout the entire pre-K [to] post-12 continuum. This is a unique feature of the position, and one that I find most exciting. Having worked in a number of districts, I can say that every community I served had the same basic priority — to ensure its schools prepare its young people to seize the opportunities that await them in the real world,” said Provost.
“What keeps many of us in the field is trying to do what’s best for our own students. A lot of us are seeing the potential of the future, and we’re working towards that for our students. We want to prepare them,” Czaporowski said, adding, “I think we are increasing the quality of education all the time in Westfield.”
McKenzie said while some people “are off” the job of superintendent, she still likes it. Asked what she likes best about it, she said, “Working with people, partnering with families, identifying ways to solve problems together, providing educators with the resources they need to inspire students, working with talented and dedicated people ... all of it, really.”
|
