The average time a principal stays at Riverside is less than four years
By Elodie Page, Jaida Cooper Parrish & Makayla Turrentine
No one loves Riverside more than Jim Key, but that wasn’t enough to make him stay.
Key taught, coached, and was an assistant principal at Riverside throughout the nineties, then came back in 2004 to be the principal for an additional six years.
In 2010, he left to become the principal at Chewning Middle School.
According to Key, the reason he left involved helping other schools and spending more time with his family.
“I left Riverside because I was asked to by the superintendent…to work in a school that was not doing as well as Riverside,” Key said. “The superintendent asked me if I’d be willing to try to make it a better environment for their students and their families and their community.”
Key’s six-year stint as Riverside’s principal is the longest in school history. On average, Riverside’s principals leave in less than four years.
“I loved being a principal at Riverside High School, I loved every minute of it,” Key said. “I have nothing but fond memories.”
Key lived and breathed Riverside while he was here.
“I was working at times up to 80 hours a week, and it was taking a toll on me and my family,” he said.
A high school principal has far more responsibilities than other faculty and staff.
“You are there a lot, often six days a week, and often very early in the morning until sometimes very late at night,” Key said.
Those times don’t include the seven hours of school every day.
“There’s a lot involved with being a high school principal, and there’s also just a lot of pressure, in schools, on students, on teachers and principals, in terms of accountability, test scores, various things happening within the community, and safety,” he said.
The commitment and responsibilities a high school principal has might explain why they don’t stay at the same school for a very long time.
According to EducationNC (EdNC), one in four principals leave their profession each year in North Carolina, and a 2021 Education Week study showed that 35% of newly appointed principals who resigned said they were less enthusiastic about their jobs than they were when they first started.
Simply put, if it takes 80 hours a week to do the job well, that also leads people to burn out.
Riverside has had 10 principals since the school opened in 1991, not including interms who led the school while the district interviewed and hired new candidates. On average, they leave after about three years, which means there has rarely been a graduating class that has had the same principle as freshmen and seniors.
Riverside’s Principals Through the Years:
A NATIONAL TREND
According to a 2019 report published by the Learning Policy Institute, these numbers are not uncommon.
In 2016-2017, the national average tenure of principals in their schools was four years. A closer look reveals that 35% of principals were at their school for less than two years, and only 11% have ever stayed for 10 years or more.
The report also suggests the annual turnover rate of principals was 18% nationally, and in higher-poverty schools, that number was 21%.
After leading Chewning for one year, Key was promoted to assistant superintendent, then worked as the DPS area superintendent for high schools for three years before he retired. As area superintendent, Key worked with many principals across the district.
“[The turnover] is not unique to Riverside,” he said. “That is the nature of the job.”
Key said that each principal that leaves has their own individual reasons.
“It’s a very, very unique situation,” he said. “However, being the principal of a large comprehensive high school is challenging.”
Looking back, he thinks being a high school principal may have been harder than being a district administrator.
“I still had pressures and stressors, but the high school principals were probably putting in more time than I was,” he said. “I think that’s something that a lot of times people don’t quite understand or appreciate. Even people in the central office don’t understand and appreciate how hard the high school principals, the vice principals, and the teachers are [working].”
Key acknowledged that the stress and pressure can result in leaders deciding to take a different route.
“I know firsthand there are elementary school and middle school principals who don’t want to be in high school because of the time commitment,” he said.
But the commitment can attract people to the job, too. Broc Dickerson graduated from Riverside in 2004 and came back to be a health and P.E. teacher and wrestling coach. He later got his masters in school administration at NC State, was hired by DSA, and has been working there as an assistant principal for four years.
Dickerson loves his job because he can cast a wider net and impact more students.
“You get the opportunity to work with all students in the entire school, as well as faculty,” he said. “The truth is it wasn’t really on my radar. I wasn’t looking to become an assistant principal.”
Dickerson was encouraged by a past principal, who explained the process of applying to become an assistant principal.
“My internship forced me to leave the school that I was familiar with and go to an unfamiliar place,” he said. “You have to intern for a year, and that’s the reason I left [Riverside]. I just happened to be hired by the school that I interned at.”
Being an assistant principal at DSA has given Dickerson a taste of what leading a school would be like.
“I’m not making that a secret,” he said. “I definitely aspire to be principal.”
Although he can make a school-wide impact in his current role, Dickerson thinks principals can do it on an even larger scale. But he also knows the opportunity would bring pressures and responsibilities that other faculty members don’t have to deal with.
“A perfect Riverside example is that neighborhood that’s right next to the school,” he said. “When I was a teacher, three or four times a week, people from that neighborhood were calling about students walking on their property. Whatever is in your lap as a principal, the buck stops with you.”
He also agrees that this added pressure contributes to the high turnover rates, and it is not unique to Riverside.
“You’re dealing with the community at a larger scale, not just the parents in your own school. You’re dealing with the community that is around your school. You know, even businesses, neighborhoods.”
A GOOD PROBLEM, TOO
Burnout isn’t the only reason principals leave their positions.
Principals who do well leading small schools often move to larger schools. A bigger school brings more students and teachers, but also a higher salary.
Gloria Woods-Weeks, Riverside’s current principal, has held the position since October of 2021. Before that, she was principal at J.D. Clement Early College High School for eight years.
Woods-Weeks, who declined an interview for this story, has been working in education for 30 years. With that amount of experience and being at a school with over 1600 students enrolled, she is making upwards of $97,239 as an annual base salary. A principal with the same amount of experience but at a smaller school of around 400-700 students would make 4% less than that, with an annual base salary of approximately $93,350.
A significantly larger supplement to these base pay rates is added based on the enrollment at a school as well. This means Woods-Weeks earns a supplement salary of approximately $62,640 as opposed to the $44,960 supplement she would receive had she stayed at J.D. Clement Early College High School.
High-performing principals from large schools like Riverside also move to district-level leadership positions.
“Sometimes [principals] have aspirations to do more than be a principal,” Dickerson said. “Maybe they want to be a superintendent or be a mentor to principals. We’ve seen lots of principals come through Riverside who have opportunities to do that.”
For example, Key was a principal at Riverside and became an assistant area superintendent with DPS. Pat Rhodes was Riverside’s principal from 2000 to 2004 and became superintendent of Orange County Schools. Tonya Williams-Leathers was the principal from 2016 to 2020 and left to be an assistant superintendent in Johnson County.
“When you’re really good, it’s a natural progression that people want to see you kind of scale up and do more and more and more,” Dickerson said. “Not unlike the assistant principal to the principal should. When they’re good, there’s pressure to scale up, and often people aspire to do that anyways [because of] financial incentives.”
At least half of Riverside’s past principals have moved up to district leadership positions. But when they leave, teachers and students still have to deal with the challenges that come with getting a new principal every few years.
English teacher Matt Smith has worked for seven different principals during his 21 years working at Riverside. He said the frequent leadership changes have affected him and his students in several ways.
“It’s hard to keep school culture,” he said. “If I come into a building that I’ve never worked in before, and 90% of the people were there last year, and I’m supposed to be their boss, that’s a really hard thing to walk into.”
“It’s difficult to maintain a steady culture when the leadership changes frequently,” said Christy Simpson, who has worked in the math department at Riverside for 17 years. “I think it takes the first few years for you to actually get to know the principal and what they want and what their vision is for a school, and then you can actually start making gains towards those things. ”
“If you could make somebody stay put for, like, 10 years, I think that would probably be different,” Smith said. “You could know the culture and know the people. It’s tough to come in and make relationships with 100-something staff and 1800 students. But It’s [also] a hard job to do for 10 years.”
“When new principals come in, they don’t know the faculty as well,” said CTE teacher Fenale Brandan, who has worked at Riverside for 20 years. “It’s “hard for a teacher to express themselves about their concerns and needs.”
STUDENT IMPACT
Frequent leadership changes also create challenges for students.
“Bonds are formed with the administrators and the students,” said Tavia Webley, who has also worked for seven different principals during her 24 years teaching chemistry and forensics at Riverside.
Webley believes principals can support students in ways that teachers can’t.
“Administrators have flexibility in that they’re not within a classroom, so they can build relationships with the students greeting them in the morning, making sure that they’re okay if different conflicts arise,” she said. “There are principals that leave and, because of their time spent at the school and the relationships built with students and faculty, their presence is greatly missed.”
“The people who graduated last year had three different principals in four years,” said Smith. “That’s a really, really tough thing to navigate.”
Senior Atticus Kenney has had six different principles during his K-12 career. Most of the administrative turnover he experienced happened during COVID.
“I don’t think it affects much for students because you don’t really know what [principals] are doing,” Kenney said. “I think teacher changes are a lot more important.”
Kenney does, however, think principals being at Riverside for less than four years creates a domino effect that eventually hurts students.
“It impacts teacher culture, which then affects student culture,” he said. “It’s hard to set a culture at Riverside if you’re swapping principals every four years, it would be like swapping a head coach in football every four years – it’s hard to have a culture and identity.”
Senior Parker Collins agrees.
“They change things around,” he said. “We had SMART lunch and then we didn’t have SMART lunch. It all depends on how that principal wants to run the school.
“I think it’s really hard for teachers and admin to get on the same page, especially with somebody new coming in all the time,” Collins said. “There isn’t really an established culture between the teachers and administration.”
