At last week's Federal Hocking Local School Board meeting, district Superintendent Jim Patsey asked the board members to consider approving a five-year contract renewal for him.
Patsey's contract does not end until July 31, but he said he made the request to renew it now to show the board and area residents his dedication to the district.
Since the district's formation in 1965, the district has had 10 superintendents, only one of which was at the district more than five years. This would be normal at a large urban district, said Tom Mooney, president of the Ohio Federation of Teachers.
But having only two superintendents stay longer than four years in the course of 40 years in a smaller rural district did seem like short average tenure, Mooney said.
The national average tenure of a superintendent is about seven years, said Donna Boylan, director of member assistance with the Buckeye Association of School Administrators.
Ohio is close to the national average, with an average stay of about 6.9 years for a superintendent in a district, Boylan said. However, 75 to 150 superintendents in Ohio leave their position each year. With 613 school districts in Ohio, that means almost one in six superintendents in the state change jobs each year.
While Mooney said it was not normal for a rural school district to change superintendents so often, he said it did not surprise him. The tenure of superintendents has been going down on average, and he attributes this in part to pressure on the administrators to turn around failing districts.
Like the sheriff in an old western
(the superintendent's) going to come into town on a horse and clean up the town all himself and when he doesn't it's time to get rid of the sheriff
Mooney said. We put too much emphasis on the school district bureaucracy for delivering education.
Another reason for superintendents having shorter stays could be school-board politics, Mooney said.
Patsey said he could only guess what the reasons were that superintendents left the district in the past.
I would say this: the board has a history of being divided
and it's very difficult for the superintendent to work under those conditions
said Patsey.
Susan Cooper, a board member, also was on the Federal Hocking Local School Board in the early 1980s during the stay of Tim Lairson. Lairson was the district's superintendent for 15 years -three times the stay of any previous superintendent.
Having a divided board could make things difficult, Cooper said. She said she believes a division does not occur because of different opinions but because of an inability to communicate and to discuss the issues.
I think your board has to know its role and that's to set policy and give direction. You have to learn how to work together
Cooper said.
Cooper said she did not know the reason for the district's recent high turnaround rate because she was only recently re-elected to the board.
Boylan said another issue might be the difficulty administrators have in finding ways to fund schools without going to the taxpayers.
I think that the pressures caused by the school funding issue as well as that and people don't understand why schools are still going back to the tax payers for money
Boylan said. And so people blame the administration for school funding problems.
In Federal Hocking, they are seeking a bond issue and a levy in May to build a new school. The district is in a deficit and has been laying off staff members.
As for the current superintendent, the board decided to put aside Patsey's request for a five-year contract until after a second series of evaluations. Patsey publicly challenged the first series of his evaluations by the board at a meeting in January. The evaluations were split between high marks and low marks. This is not unusual in the district. According to past personnel reports, even Lairson received some low evaluations despite his long tenure in the district.
The board will determine the terms of Patsey's contract at an August meeting.
However, Cooper said she does not believe in giving five-year contracts, no matter who it is.
It's not about the person
Cooper said. It's because of the economy. We don't know what the financial situation could be.
Boylan said districts have to understand that it takes time for a superintendent to help a school district improve.
It's very
very difficult for school districts to maintain the basic stability to promote change and improvement without promoting stability in administration
Boylan said.
