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Brian Woods, right, congratulates John Craft, left, who was named the lone finalist to replace him as the Northside ISD superintendent in 2023. Woods, who retired that year, said that a mounting number of challenges make leading a traditional public school\u00a0district increasingly difficult.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Ronald Cortes \/ Contribuitor<\/p>\n
Budget constraints, a shortage of high-quality teachers, school board turmoil and the demands of the job are accelerating turnover among school district leaders locally and across the state.<\/p>\n
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In the Austin area, Bastrop<\/a> and Leander<\/a> Independent School Districts have announced new leaders this school year. Austin ISD\u2019s superintendent has already outlasted many urban peers, even though he has held the job permanently since 2024.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThis is absolutely a statewide phenomenon. This is not a local situation at all. And it\u2019s not unique to Central Texas,\u201d said\u00a0Brian Woods, the former superintendent of San Antonio\u2019s largest district. \u201cI think there are \u2026 a number of factors contributing to it.\u201d<\/p>\n RELATED: Judson ISD trustees accuse former superintendent of mismanaging district before firing him<\/a><\/p>\n In Texas, school funding depends<\/a> on enrollment, attendance and local property values. Many districts have faced financial strain in recent years as birth rates fall and charter schools draw students away.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n Woods, who led Northside ISD for more than a decade<\/a>, said a \u201clack of support from state leadership in Texas\u201d to raise more money for traditional public schools has made the job harder and helped drive turnover.<\/p>\n Northside stretches from San Antonio\u2019s far West Side into Bexar County\u2019s north-central area. It serves students in urban, suburban and\u00a0semirural communities. Like the areas it serves, the district\u2019s demographics closely mirror the state in both ethnicity and income.<\/p>\n \u201cYou saw virtually no turnover in 2020 and early 2021,\u201d Woods said. \u201cFolks were staying in place just to try to get their districts through it, and so I think that\u2019s part of it. But then you\u2019ll remember, it didn\u2019t take long after the pandemic got kicked off, that schools became a real\u2026point of contention around all of the kind of social issues that the pandemic brought up.\u201d<\/p>\n ENROLLMENT: Why San Antonio schools are closing\u00a0\u2014 and what comes next<\/a><\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n The job, he said, has become harder.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI was about 55 or so, and there\u2019s a real calculus in your mind about, \u2018is the toll that this is taking worth staying around\u2019\u201d said Woods, who retired in 2023. \u201cAnd I had opportunities to go do other things that were interesting to me, but perhaps not 70 or 80 hours a week, and that was enticing too.\u201d<\/p>\n He also pointed to post-pandemic politics as another reason for increased turnover. Often, the superintendent is the only employee a school board can hire or fire. A study by the\u00a0Council of the Great City Schools <\/a>found that the average tenure of superintendents is about 2.7 years post-pandemic.<\/a><\/p>\n \u201cThe pandemic conditions were unique, they were unique to the superintendency, just as they were unique to the nation,\u201d said Ray Hart, executive director of the organization. \u201cI think coming out of that were a lot of superintendents who wanted to guide their districts through that process. But once we got through the pandemic, we saw a number of them taking opportunities to retire or step away.\u201d<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n RELATED: Former North East ISD Superintendent Sean Maika has new job in San Antonio<\/a><\/p>\n Hart said board politics in many of the districts in his organization\u2019s study may not have changed much since the pandemic, but have \u201calways been a dynamic.\u201d Instead, the scrutiny large urban districts face can add pressure for the school systems\u2019 top job.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the major challenges in our districts is that the role is unique,\u201d Hart said. \u201cState education agencies tend to pay greater attention to the larger urban districts in the state than they do to kind of some of the smaller districts. So the political pressure, the politics of the role, are very different in large urban districts than they are in other districts across the state.\u201d<\/p>\n RAND, a nonprofit research organization, surveys superintendents across the country annually<\/a> and has found that budget constraints have remained a major source of stress since the pandemic.<\/p>\n Article continues below this ad<\/p>\n