Opening for Principal Goes Begging at San Diego School : Education: Year-round schedule, burnout factor cited as district considers outside applicants for performing-arts magnet school.

An opening for the post of principal at Valencia Park Elementary School beginning Feb. 1 attracted not a single applicant when advertised last month among the 160 San Diego city school principals eligible to compete to head the Southeast San Diego school.

The lack of principals willing to transfer and face an admittedly formidable challenge of proving themselves at the district’s sixth-largest elementary school both surprised and disappointed schools Supt. Tom Payzant.

The school is the site of both complicated educational programs and plans for social service projects.

Valencia Park would offer ambitious principals from smaller schools a chance for a larger salary, the opportunity to manage innovative educational programs, and the promise of possible advancement into top district administration.

On Tuesday, Payzant will recommend to school trustees that the school’s vice principal serve as interim principal through June, that a retired district principal be brought in to temporarily help out, and that the position then be re-advertised to principals both inside and outside the district.

Only once before in the past decade has the district solicited applicants for principal from outside the district, and the school board has never selected someone from the outside.

The situation at Valencia Park stems from aspects particular to the school itself as much as from changing school district policies and demographics, Payzant and others say.

As the district’s elementary performing arts magnet school, Valencia Park has 52 teachers and 1,240 students--54% black, 15% Filipino, 14% white, 11% Latino--from both the immediate neighborhood and throughout the city under voluntary integration busing programs.

Because of its size, the school is on a complex multi-track year-round schedule, under which the school is always open, with the number of teachers and students at any given time based on how they are placed on overlapping nine-week tracks to cope with crowding. In addition, the poverty and family problems of many neighborhood students affect the classroom environment, and the school will attempt to put into operation next fall a social services program based on a successful model in New Haven, Conn., which would include a family mental health team as a major component.

The school is also in the forefront of the district’s restructuring plans to give teachers and parents at individual sites more control over how they plan and carry out programs. As part of the new autonomy, teachers and parents will help screen and interview candidates for principal.

“I think that a lot of principals have heard those at schools with multi-track and its 12-month assignments talk about how tough the work is, and concluded that the pay increase--maybe an extra 5% to 7%--is not worth the extra headache,” said George Russell, who heads district personnel services. Multi-track schedules increasingly will be pushed at district schools as a result of increasing enrollments and a lack of funds to build new schools.

In addition, the particular challenges of motivating and pushing large numbers of disadvantaged students to greater academic success may be unattractive to some principals, Russell added.

Carolyn Dubuque, a longtime district administrator who is leaving Valencia Park after five years, said the school “is a plum waiting to walk into, as long as you have the energy.”

Dubuque reflected her ambivalence about both her choice to leave and the lack of a successor at this point. While saying that she was “shocked that there was no one wanting to take a fantastic opportunity to prove themselves,” Dubuque added that she “is worn out after five years.”

Dubuque is taking a $17,000 annual pay cut to transfer to the Mira Mesa area, where she will open the new Hage Elementary School in September.

“Maybe some (of my principal colleagues) knew that I was worn out and trying to look at my own values and balance my life, so that could have been a factor” in their not applying, Dubuque said. “This school is a handful even for an experienced principal.”

Dubuque said that most principals at the district’s 19 multi-track year-round schools are close to burning out and are hoping for transfers but, unlike her, also want to protect their existing salaries. These principals have asked that they be given a second vice principal to handle the administrative tasks at their schools but have been turned down because the district cannot afford the $500,000 extra cost involved.

Dubuque offered to give up two months of her own salary this year to apply toward the salary of a second vice principal, but she was turned down.

Russell said the combination of multi-track and minority educational challenges could also be at work in the ongoing process to choose a new principal beginning next month at Webster Elementary, a multi-track year-round school in Southeast San Diego with a life sciences magnet program.

There were only four applicants for that position and Russell said he does not know yet whether Payzant will be able to select a qualified principal from such a small pool.

“Maybe some schools need to have a broader application base,” Russell said, citing Payzant’s proposal to open the Valencia Park selection up to principals at schools outside the San Diego Unified School District. “You do have people out there like Paul White who are looking for the challenges of a Valencia Park or an Emerson.”

White is the much-praised former principal of Valley Center Middle School who left his post last June because he wanted to head an inner-city urban school. Because of San Diego Unified’s policy of not soliciting principals from the outside, White was recruited for a middle school in San Francisco.

Payzant said his wish to solicit outside comes “from the fact that no one applied from inside the first time around, and that in a district this size (the nation’s eighth-largest), we ought to be able to do this from time to time without putting our own people in jeopardy” of not being able to advance.

Bad Timing?

Irv McClure, head of the district’s administrators association--which includes all principals and vice-principals--said it remains opposed to solicitation from the outside, although it has only advisory powers with the district. He said that some principals might have been reluctant to apply for the Valencia Park position because it occurred during mid-year.

“Some principals have strong commitments to their staffs and to the community where they presently are, and feel uncomfortable leaving during the middle of the year,” McClure said.

“By Dr. Payzant setting the process back to July, I think we will find a number of applicants.”

But McClure also said that many principals are uncertain about the district’s new policies, such as the cases where teachers and parents at both Valencia Park and Tierrasanta Elementary have become involved in the principal selection process.

“There are a lot of changes coming about in the schools as a result of restructuring,” McClure said. “We recognize that the (longstanding) process for selecting principals can be waived under restructuring but we want to proceed cautiously.”

Nancy Howard, the new principal at Tierrasanta, was selected through a committee of parents and teachers working with Payzant when that North City post opened in mid-year 1989.

“I thought the process was great because it meant that, if selected, I would be at a school where the teachers and parents would be getting the type of principal that they wanted,” Howard said.