Knowing When To Move On

My View

Other education leaders have written about recognizing when the time is right to leave a work position or a school district to do something else. In most cases, these leaders describe scenarios in which tensions have grown to an insufferable level, where the makeup of the school board has transformed overnight by an election or where relationships have fractured beyond easy repair.

In those cases, it’s easy to understand why a superintendent would be ready to transition in her or his career.

Last December, I attended a presentation by Donald Ogilvie, retired district superintendent of the Erie 1 BOCES in Buffalo, N.Y., titled “Administrative Resiliency: How To Keep Bouncing Back.” My question to the speaker was quite different. I wanted to know this: “How do you know when it’s time to move on when things are really GOOD?”

Pangs of Irrelevancy

Since last summer, I’d been thinking about my work in the Randolph Central Schools, a district of 950 students in southwestern New York where I’d been superintendent for 7½ years. I was contemplating where I was professionally and the rest of my career. Things have been really good in Randolph. Of course, there’s always work to be done in an organization with an $18 million operating budget and almost 200 employees. But we’ve generally got it figured out, and as our leadership teams have grown in their competence, I’ve been feeling more and more irrelevant.

Mentally, I was craving the kind of organizational system problem solving that provides a sense of purpose. I want to know my work is making a significant difference that benefits students and employees. We’d largely figured out those things in Randolph over the past several years. We have experienced teachers and administrators who know our systems and how they best work to serve our students — and an incredibly experienced, thoughtful board of education. The place is humming along nicely.

The evidence of our school improvement success is the consistent and dramatic increases in academic achievement, the positive climate survey findings and our successful contract negotiations with positive budget votes by the community.

The choice I faced was this: Should I continue to work in the environment that I tried so hard to create, knowing that the biggest challenges are behind me? Or should I leave the sustainability of the system to other capable leaders in the organization and look for an opportunity to influence an education system elsewhere? Perhaps there’s another school system where those educators working hard within the district and those children and families could benefit from committed, sustained instructional leadership?

Could my sense of purpose and meaning be renewed by a change in position? Or should I sit back and enjoy the ride?

A Quest for Purpose

In early March, I had the opportunity to take on a new challenge. I was fortunate to be appointed superintendent of the Springville-Griffith Institute Central School District, with its 1,850 students enrolled in four buildings about 20 miles south of downtown Buffalo.

My rationale for this move to another district was centered on the incredible accomplishments of all those affiliated with the Randolph schools. The problems we had when I arrived had been eliminated. Trust exists among employees, administration and board of education members.

The district has systems in place in which teachers support one another with a coherent, shared curriculum. Teachers are doing more each year with technology tools that personalize learning for all students. The district is on the cusp of purchasing a useful basal reading series to improve instruction in English language arts. Everyone in the system is pulling his or her own weight.

We have cleaner buildings and floors and a capital project in Randolph set to go that will take care of masonry, roof tops, phone and data upgrades, fire detection and alarm systems, stage rigging and lighting, a safer flow in the parking lot, a new running track and a new heating system in the high school. Randolph holds an admirable budget position that balances the needs of students with the needs of taxpayers.

And owing to all of this, I realized with every passing day that Randolph is a successful, healthy organization in which the members of the school community own the responsibility for that continued success. I wanted a feeling of purpose again. I wanted to think and analyze and solve problems. I wanted the chance to build relationships and systems that could improve education for another school community.

And that is why I’m moving on.