Parents Ask Why Principals Have Left

Despite the appointment of two new principals in Newport-Mesa Unified this week, concern still lingers among some parents who wonder whether seven departures in the past several months signifies something amiss in the district.

But Supt. Robert Barbot said the departures were all for personal or professional reasons and not a result of strained relations.

“There’s not a person that made a change because they were disgruntled with us as a school district,” Barbot said. “There was nothing like that.”

Principals were appointed last week for Newport Harbor and Costa Mesa high schools, and replacements at Abraham Lincoln and Killybrooke elementary schools were announced last month.

Three schools--Adams Elementary, Mariners Elementary and Ensign Intermediate--have temporary principals while the district looks for permanent replacements. The three stand-ins are educators who already work for the district.

And while parents accept that principals have left for various reasons, they say they want to be sure there isn’t a problem bubbling beneath the surface.

“I think the district is by far doing the right thing at this point by searching out the best candidates,” said Graham Tingler, a father of two students at Mariners. “The bigger issue is why are so many principals leaving?”

Tingler said he is concerned that with the growing demands on principals to be accountable for students’ progress, they are not receiving enough support from the district or the community to carry on with their jobs.

“Let’s investigate and see what the real issues are,” Tingler said. “How can we help these principals handle the workload that is required of them by the district and the state?”

Similar issues have, in fact, led to a nationwide shortage of principals, who at many schools find themselves doing everything from directing traffic in the parking lot to filling in as a substitute teacher.

Barbot said the level of turnover in the schools’ top spots is about what a district expects with 34 principals and that he did not think it was surprising.

The departures may have had a larger ripple effect because three of the schools--Mariners Elementary, Ensign Intermediate and Newport Harbor High--are clustered in the same part of Newport Beach.

Families living in the northwestern corner of the city send their children to the three schools, and one parent, Lisa Boler, had children at all of them last year.

“People move on for whatever reason, and it’s just kind of a coincidence it happened at one time,” said Boler, who is president of the district’s PTA Council.

Teacher and principal salaries in Newport-Mesa are lower than in some other Orange County school districts, “so that could be one of the factors in the changes,” said Linda Mook, president of the district’s teachers union. “But I think the district is working hard to address that.”

Mook and the teachers union are negotiating a salary for the coming school year, and she said the principals will be doing the same.

But Mook didn’t see the principals’ departures as a sign of unrest within the district.

“It’s a stressful job,” she said, “but I think [these principals] are moving on for the most part because of personal and professional goals.”