Interim principalships: filling an 11th-hour need to buy time for a permanent successor.
School Administrator › Vol. 60 Nbr. 6, June 2003
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Interim principalships: filling an 11th-hour need to buy time for a permanent successor.
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 your...See the full content of this document
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