North Carolina school systems’ superintendents feature a lot of new faces these days.
Soon — within several months or longer — a new face will head the state’s largest school system.
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Wake County is joining at least eight other school systems in North Carolina and hundreds nationally in actively looking for a superintendent. Superintendent Catty Moore will retire July 1, after serving five years in the role.
The Wake County Board of Education will soon begin its search for a new superintendent and heard a presentation Tuesday by the North Carolina School Boards Association about how best to go about hiring a new one. The association often bids to conduct searches, and Wake County school board members are leaning toward contracting with the association to begin the search as soon as next month.
The search will be a major undertaking, experts say, but the Wake County superintendent job should be one of the top jobs on the market, even with the glut in openings.
“You have a quality school system in Wake County,” said Dave Domenech, executive director of AASA, the School Superintendents Association. “So it's going to be very attractive to superintendents in smaller districts who will want to see this as an opportunity to move up the ladder in terms of superintendents.”
The Wake County Public School System’s size may put off applicants from very small school systems, Domenech said, but the district can attract experienced candidates from sizable districts.
The school system’s nearly 160,000 students make it the 15th largest district in the nation, out of more than 13,000 districts.
Rising turnover
Roughly one in every four or five North Carolina school superintendents leaves their job each year, according to the North Carolina School Superintendents Association.
That’s what turnover has looked like since the COVID-19 pandemic turned schools upside down, increasing the pressure and stress faced by superintendents working already high-pressure and stressful jobs. Executives across the nation reported working day and night, holding virtual staff meetings in the middle of the night in the early days of the pandemic.
While pandemic precautions have largely disappeared, scrutiny remains high and schools remain stretched thin — this time, because of high staff vacancies, according to Jack Hoke, executive director of the state association.
Hoke said more superintendents are retiring once they’re eligible to, rather than continuing to work a few more years. But many have also been fired by increasingly partisan school boards and boards in turmoil, he said.
Turnover used to be much lower, Hoke said.
Nationally, AASA put typical superintendent turnover at about 14% to 16% in a 2010 report. In other words, about one in seven superintendents left their position that year.
This school year, 27 of North Carolina’s 115 superintendents, or 23.5%, have left, either just before the year started or during the school year. It was 20% the year before that and 22.6% the year before that — numbers indicating school system leadership across the state is mostly new faces.
Hoke suspects politics, in addition to added pandemic-era stress, are part of why turnover is higher. Just a decade ago, only 10 of North Carolina’s 115 school boards were elected through partisan races, EducationNC reported. Several dozen are partisan now.
“There's always politics [at] the local board level with an elected board of education,” Hoke said. “But the partisanship has created probably a little more politics than we've been accustomed to.”
In the past three years, Hoke said, school boards and superintendents have faced harsh criticism — and support — for policies related to remote learning, then masking, then critical race theory and library books. Those were topics that reverberated locally but often originated nationally.
“That takes its toll on everybody involved,” Hoke said.
A competitive market
A school district’s appeal is important in a market that favors candidates.
The large majority of superintendents in the nation’s 30 biggest school systems are either looking for a superintendent or have only just hired one in the past two years.
Wake County will be looking alongside Charlotte-Mecklenberg Schools’; Broward County Schools in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.; Baltimore County Schools; Memphis-Shelby County; Northside Independent School District in San Antonio, Texas; and DeKalb County, Georgia. Only Charlotte-Mecklenberg, Broward and Memphis-Shelby are also county-wide school systems. All three of those systems’ school boards pushed out their previous superintendents.
“Not as many people are interested in being superintendents these days, said Sam Thorp, who is the assistant legal counsel for superintendent searches at the North Carolina School Boards Association. That doesn’t mean the hiring pools are bad, he said.
“It just means you have smaller pools of really strong candidates,” Thorp said. “And you do have less folks with sitting superintendent experience.”
Thorp told the school board Tuesday he expected they'd get roughly 13-25 candidates in a nationwide search, but he stressed that they would be quality candidates.
Most superintendents in North Carolina have less than five years of experience, Hoke said. But five years is about the right amount of time needed for a superintendent to implement and realize their vision. Too frequent turnover, Hoke said, is harmful for student learning. It reduces stability and direction for staff, students, parents and the community, he said.
“Experience matters,” Hoke said. The longer a person is in that position, he said, the more easily one can implement strategy and start seeing results.
Prospective superintendents will look at a school district’s per-student funding and existing test scores, Domenech said.
Wake County’s per-student spending isn’t as high as its similarly sized counterparts, but its test scores are above the North Carolina average.
“Two of the biggest draws for candidates are the size of a school system and the location of it,” Thorp said.
“Size” isn’t just students, the number of which may deter at least some candidates, Thorp said. Size is also a district’s budget and resources and its ability to make meaningful changes.
Wake County should appeal for both its size and location, he said. It also has the added benefit of performing comparatively well academically and being a relatively stable place for a superintendent.
“I think Wake’s going to be a very desirable place to serve as a superintendent,” he said.
Hiring a superintendent
Superintendents are hired by school boards. Those hires are the biggest responsibility a board has and the only hiring decisions the boards directly control.
School boards typically hire a superintendent using a third-party search firm, selected through a bidding process.
That can cost many thousands of dollars. At the same time, the search is conducted by a group that specializes in superintendent hiring, which also lessens the burden placed on volunteer school board members who often also work full-time jobs and have families.
A firm can work with the school board to identify the type of leader they’re looking for. Then, it can recruit and vet candidates before recommending a handful for the board to formally interview.
On Tuesday, board members responded favorably to the North Carolina School Boards Association's pitch to conduct the search, which would cost about $25,000. That's less than than $50,000 to $100,000 most third-party search firms cost. It would also include multiple interviews, community surveys on what to look for in a superintendent and would last as many as 24 weeks.
The association conducted the board's last search, which resulted in Moore's hire.
The board could approve of a contract with the association as soon as March, or it could issue a request for proposals for other search firms.