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The Pipeline Is Shrinking
School districts throughout Michigan are struggling to recruit experienced applicants to their top leadership position as a shortage of people becoming teachers creates a blockage in the pipeline to administrative roles.
Each year, nearly one in every five Michigan school districts replaces its superintendent. That’s about 70 to 90 superintendents turning over per year.
In the WKAR News listening area, superintendent searches are underway in:
- Lansing
- Okemos
- Potterville
- Olivet
Across Michigan, superintendent searches are also underway in:
- Dearborn
- Kenowa Hills
- Morley Stanwood
- Hale Area
- Richmond
- Reed City
- Woodhaven
- Pewamo-Westphalia
- Wayne-Westland
- Hart
- Ludington
- Lake Linden-Hubbell
- Watervliet
- Mason County
About half of the superintendents leaving the position are retiring.
Michigan Association of Superintendents and Administrators Director Tina Kerr said with more retirements and fewer new teachers, there aren’t as many experienced superintendent candidates applying for open positions.
“Sometimes, we’re seeing people kind of get thrust into them because there aren’t any candidates, and then that obviously adds to issues of potential success because they weren’t quite ready to be there,” Kerr said.
From Teacher Shortages to Leadership Gaps
Madeline Mavrogordato leads the Education Policy Innovation Collaborative at Michigan State University.
She said districts are hiring inexperienced and non-certified teachers to fill vacancies as demand exceeds supply, which leads to less experienced candidates for administrative positions and creates more work for existing superintendents.
“When that happens, there's a lot more mentoring that needs to happen and support that needs to happen of the educator workforce, and that's rolling up to superintendents too, to support that work,” Mavrogordato said.
Okemos Superintendent John Hood is retiring this year to focus on his health and family. He said districts are losing institutional knowledge as experienced leaders retire.
“Organizations have had to, like Okemos, try to recreate what were our systems, because, you know, a lot of our systems are the people that have been here 20 or 30 or more years,” Hood said.
The Weight of the Job
Rachel White is the director of The Superintendent Lab at the University of Texas at Austin.
She said the biggest reasons superintendents seek other jobs are politics, stress and school boards.
Kerr said MASA trains prospective administrators on the importance of minimizing friction with school board members.
“Next to the relationship at home, the most important relationship you have at school is with that board,” Kerr said. “You have to make time, you have to cultivate that relationship, you have to build it, and you have to build trust.”
She said being a superintendent has become increasingly difficult.
Superintendents have to consider student safety, curriculum and building management. And they have to do it while planning around uncertain budgets with increasingly restricted uses for funds, recruiting and retaining teachers in a job market that favors employees and navigating community tensions and federal policy changes.
Politics, Pressure and Public Scrutiny
“You’ve got to have thick skin,” Kerr said. “You’ve got to be willing to be put on the spot all the time and scrutinized, and that’s tough for some people.”
Leadership changes can disrupt district progress, Mavrogordato said.
“Often, any progress that has been occurring, sort of slows or maybe even stops until the new superintendent says ‘This is my agenda. This is what we're going to do to move the district forward, and this is where we're going to focus,” Mavrogordato said.
If leadership changes occur frequently, Marvrogordato said it can be harder to get principals and other district leaders to buy into the new leader’s strategic plans.
Kerr said a district needs at least five years of consistent leadership to improve student achievement.
Who Is Most Affected
White said districts with higher proportions of students living in poverty or students of color are much more likely to experience frequent leadership changes.
If all else is held equal between districts, the biggest predictor of whether a district will experience turnover is the superintendent’s gender, with districts led by women much more likely to experience turnover.
Mavrogordato said districts with lower enrollment, often in rural areas, may have less success in recruiting experienced candidates, as they’re viewed as less attractive than urban districts, which can offer better pay and other advantages.
After the Pandemic Spike
Greg Sieszputowski leads executive search services for the Michigan Association of School Boards.
He said Michigan is better positioned than some states, fielding about 20 applicants to each superintendent vacancy. Other states, he said, might get only two or three.
But he said the experience level of applicants has decreased.
During the 2024-2025 academic year, just 26 of the 83 superintendent vacancies in Michigan were filled by candidates who had previous superintendent experience, Sieszputowski said.
Still, turnover rates have returned to normal after seeing a spike during the COVID-19 pandemic, when about 300 superintendents left their position in three years, Sieszputowski said.
Superintendents who took jobs during the pandemic, he said, have been gaining experience and are quickly becoming a new generation of experienced leaders.
“We're going to be hitting a place very soon where the majority of superintendents in the state are going to at least have 5 years of experience,” Sieszputowski said.
Okemos Looks Ahead
With Okemos Public Schools interviewing candidates for his replacement this week, Hood is reflecting on his three-decade career in the district.
He said public schools being expected to be “everything to everyone, when we’re not funded or supported at the level to do so,” made his job more difficult.
But Hood said his focus, like many in public education, has remained the same since he started.
“For me, the pattern has been bigger classrooms,” he said. “I was an intern, and then I was a teacher, and then I directed drama shows, and I was a union president, and then I was a principal, and I've worked my way up to just a bigger classroom, each time, that I could help.”
