On a beautiful fall morning in Marion, North Carolina, about a half hour drive east of Asheville, Tracy Grit jumps into his Ford Explorer.
He drives over train tracks, past Baptist church steeples, long lived-in trailer homes, a quintessential main street, and a handful of Mexican restaurants on his way to the school district’s only traditional high school. Gorgeous views of the Black Mountains flash through the window.
Grit says he spends a surprising amount of time here in his car, getting to know the school district where he recently accepted the top job as superintendent of McDowell County Schools.
Grit is just one of 30 new superintendents across North Carolina this fall, in a state with 115 school districts. Most of the new superintendents, like him, have never had the title before. This year, nine are serving in an interim role, and the ranks of Black, Latino and female superintendents have all declined slightly.
As the job grows more complex — and schools become more central to the culture wars — superintendent turnover is becoming more problematic in North Carolina.
“What definitely makes it more difficult is this was not a town that I cut my teeth in,” Grit says.
“It’s been a steady dose of just trying to figure a whole lot of stuff out in a hurry,” Grit adds. “You’ve moved here in a hurry. You’re basically speed dating, meeting other people in the community.”
On this particular morning, he meets with the editor of the local newspaper to discuss Grit’s new column titled, “A Note from School.” He wants to write directly to parents, to combat any negative perceptions of what school is like these days.
“We just need to tell our story a little bit,” Grit explains. “Why not say, ‘Hey, here are the great things we're doing?’ You know, rather than the things that sometimes can be politicized.”
Being a superintendent is inherently political, because a big part of the job is working with a district’s locally elected school board. Superintendents also attend public board meetings, which — in recent years — have become a center stage for community debates over COVID-19 masking policies, book challenges and how Americans speak publicly about issues of racism and gender.
Throughout the day, Grit often fields calls from members of the school board, but his daily duties go far beyond politics. He’s responsible for the school district’s curriculum and testing, human resources, child nutrition services, transportation, security, facilities, finances and operations.
“And did I mention, spokesman, on top of all that?” Grit says with a chuckle.
Every afternoon, Grit tries to visit a couple schools. This is the moment in the day when being an educator comes front and center — when he gets to spend time with kids.
“You get a recharge,” Grit says. “I can be having a tough day… and then go into a school and it's just like you put your smile on immediately.”
Are politics the reason superintendent turnover is on the rise in NC?
Jack Hoke has been tracking a rise in superintendent turnover over the past 12 years since he became executive director of the North Carolina School Superintendents Association.
“Based on my calculations, we're losing 193.5 years of superintendent experience this year, with folks that are retiring or leaving the profession,” Hoke says.
Since last school year, more than one in four superintendents in North Carolina left the profession, the most Hoke’s seen in more than a decade of tracking it. He says this high-water mark comes after several years of turnover that’s been higher than usual. He’s concerned the constant change affects teachers and staff — and ultimately students.
“If you're continually changing visions or directions when a new superintendent comes in, what is the direction? And does everybody know the direction? That's the challenge,” Hoke says.
It’s a challenge to which Hoke personally dedicates time. Every morning, he says he wakes up before dawn, logs onto social media, plays a quick nine holes of golf (he lives adjacent to a course), and starts taking calls by 8 a.m.
“Then my phone rings constantly,” Hoke says.
Most of the calls are from superintendents. Hoke has nearly 50 years of experience in education, with a dozen as a superintendent. He serves as a mentor, coach and unofficial therapist to school administrators across the state.
“There's no extra charge for the therapy because sometimes they just call and need to talk,” Hoke says.
The association Hoke leads also runs a program for aspiring superintendents to train the next generation. Despite that effort, he says there just aren’t as many people applying for open positions, and more veterans are leaving.
When he was pursuing a doctorate in education to become a superintendent last year, Tracy Grit actually wrote his dissertation on superintendent longevity. While he can't officially disclose the geographic site of his research, he says he surveyed 115 superintendents in a “rural, Southern state.” Grit says those who responded indicated a superintendent needs about five years of experience to “really have an understanding of the job.”
“When I did that, the numbers were staggering of the number of superintendents who didn't have that five years,” Grit said. “There's a tremendous amount of us that have less than five years of experience on the job right now.”
Many things are making the job more stressful — staffing shortages, the threat of a school shooting, an on-going mental health epidemic among teens, and pressure for students to catch up after the pandemic.
“And some of the stress has been caused by the political environment that we see nationally,” Hoke says. “That has an impact in the school systems.”
Superintendents now have added worries about what school board members, lawmakers and parents have to say about book bans, “critical race theory,” or “social-emotional learning.”
“I really do believe that the educational landscape is shifting,” says Chatham County Schools’ superintendent Tony Jackson.
Jackson has been a superintendent for 15 years, and an educator for 35. He started his career as an instructional assistant, then a part-time custodian and music teacher, before working his way up as an administrator.
“When I came into the superintendency, it was really regarded as a very highly respected and revered role in a community,” Jackson says. “Now, it is seemingly an environment where you almost have to reestablish and prove that every single day.”
Some superintendents leave districts because a school board pushes them to resign, which happened recently in Orange County. That also once happened to Jackson. Hoke, with the North Carolina School Superintendents Association, can't remember a superintendent other than Jackson who was terminated by one district's school board and then went on to a successful career in other districts. Jackson says his relationship with the Nash-Rocky Mount School board changed after an election.
“It became a very different kind of relationship and at that time it was not beneficial for us to continue," Jackson said. "However, I was very, very grateful that another school system at that time saw my gifts.
“Our beliefs systems were aligned, our expectations for outcomes were aligned. I just think that when there's not that alignment, you shouldn't force it.”
Today, Jackson is one of the most senior superintendents in the state, and he treasures his job.
“I tell my staff every day, ‘I love what I do.’ I'm happy to be a superintendent,” Jackson says. “We will find a way — if there is a way — to support students and to help lift up our community using education as that vehicle.”
But Jackson and Hoke agree — superintendents must walk a tightrope every day.
“There's not as much grace for you to make the mistakes that maybe I had the opportunity to make early on in my career,” Jackson says. “It takes a lot more time now to build consensus around the issues than it once did.”
Grit wants to put relationships first, and ‘keep down the noise’
When Tracy Grit was first looking for a job in education, fresh out of college in 2001, the only one he could get that year was as a counselor for at-risk kids. These students either had a mental health issue or a referral from social services or the juvenile justice system.
“It's always near and dear to my heart to make sure that we're looking out after those kids as well,” Grit says.
This year, leading his first all-staff convocation, Grit played a country song by Chris Knight about a boy named William — a child of abuse who grows up to be an abuser.
“Somewhere along the way, in the song, you recognize that William had actually dropped out of school," Grit explains. "So, I challenged our staff to really think about, ‘You know, that kid’s in our school today, and would you be able to reach that kid?’”
It’s a very real problem in McDowell County, where the dropout rate is higher than the state average. About one in five students here don’t make it to high school graduation. That has consequences for the fabric of the local community and its economic future.
Grit believes dropout prevention comes down to long-term relationships, a strength of small town communities. He thinks of his own kindergarten teacher, Ms. Vikki Absher. He wrote about her in one of his recent newspaper columns. When she found out he’d become a school administrator, she mailed him a letter.
“She talked about how she was proud of all of her students,” Grit says.
Absher had kept in touch with many of them — the doctors, the farmers, the lawyers, and even one student who was now in prison. He had written her back to say that kindergarten was one of the happiest years of his life.
“I've since then used that letter to share with my staff, because that's the kind of relationships that we're looking for in education,” Grit says.
Grit’s goal as superintendent is to help teachers in his district focus on this, the relationships, and let him worry about the politics. In his opening speech to the county’s teachers and staff, he encouraged them to "keep the noise down."
“Let's just remember to keep the noise down so we can focus on what's going on in the classrooms,” Grit says. “We're just doing what we've always done.”
