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Date: 4/19/2022
AMHERST – During its April 12 meeting, Amherst-Pelham Regional School District Superintendent Michael Morris encouraged members of the Amherst Regional School Committee (ARSC) to provide questions or feedback on how the district plans to respond to a January report highlighting the district’s high turnover rate in school leadership.
The report, “Supporting and Retaining School Leaders,” was prepared by Rick Rogers to identify the most common stressors and barriers behind a multitude of leaders leaving after short stints. It also aimed to understand the necessary attributes and dispositions of candidates for more successful recruiting and to make recommendations related to hiring and supporting school leaders based on said findings.
Rogers reported that principals were already seeing turnover rates tick upwards across the country before COVID-19. He said that principals experience substantial job-related stress and nearly 20 percent were leaving their positions each year.
“This situation has only been exacerbated by the pandemic,” Rogers said. “In December 2021, the National Association of Secondary School Principals conducted a survey of over 500 Pre-K-12 principals. They found that nearly 40 percent of principals are expecting to leave the profession in the next three years. They noted that the pandemic has had a great deal of impact on their role with 79 percent reporting they are working harder, 73 percent working long hours and 62 percent having a harder time than ever doing their jobs.”
Still, this is no new trend for Amherst. Amherst Regional High School and Amherst Regional Middle School both have principals in their second year after having four leaders in the last 10 years. Pelham and Fort River both have interim principals, with Fort River seeing five principals in the last 10 years. Crocker Farm, Wildwood and Summit Academy have all retained their leadership for at least 10 years.
“We’re having conversations with folks that are in their first year about what mentor supports they would want for their second year,” Morris said. “We’re having a lot more administrative meetings and we’re focusing on this topic. The last two meetings have focused on priorities for our professional work and our professional culture over the next year and had an open-ended brainstorming session and prioritization sessions in small and large groups.”
Morris keyed in on increased in-person meetings as a great way to improve the professional and developmental culture for new hires especially. He has observed wider participation among individuals in group meetings that was previously impossible to come by in a virtual setting.
“We struggled to build a culture on Zoom. I know some people can do it, I have family members who work exclusively virtually, and God bless them,” Morris said. “For our work, it really helps when we’re together on a weekly basis and that’s what we’ve put in place.”
Committee member Jennifer Shiao said you find that teachers are often women and leaders are often men and wanted more supports dedicated to finding women for and retaining them in leadership roles.
“One of the most striking things to me about the report was the finding that the longest-serving administrators are all white men and most of the principals who have left were women and yet there wasn’t anything in his recommendations about supporting women in leadership roles,” Shiao said. “I think that’s something that should be addressed head-on and that we should be really thinking about.”
Morris said Rogers reached out to him after Shiao brought up the same point when the report was first released in January, saying that Shiao was correct, and it was an oversight on his part.
“The district has started affinity groups, less explicitly for leaders,” Morris responded. “There’s a women of color affinity group that I know has gotten broad participation and been positively received. We did a lot of thinking through what affinity groups are out there beyond our district so that it broadens scopes. So one of the recommendations was around how do we provide affinity groups and spaces where administrators or leaders who identify as women can receive that support so we’re putting that in place in the district.”
The meeting featured a small update to the district’s COVID-19 Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief (ESSER) funding. There was an increase to the Fiscal Year 2023 budget for ESSER funds by over $190,000 with topics previously agreed on by the committee. Doug Slaughter, the district’s finance director, said they were also able to secure $70,000 for new lighting at the stage and auditorium of Amherst Regional High School.
“We initially proposed this to the folks at the state relative to ESSER and their initial reaction was ‘no, you can’t use ESSER funds for this,’” Slaughter said. “We came back and made the case around some of the programming and some of the theatre work we do but also the classes we offer in performing arts around stagecraft and how this is integral to that curriculum. That made a much more positive impact on them and was deemed to be eligible.”
The committee will not meet again until May.