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School board to discuss principal turnover at winter retreat

I encourage you to check out Friday's story on principal turnover in the Guilford County School, which will provide context for the school board's discussion during its retreat on Saturday.

You can find most of the numbers in that article, but I link here to one spreadsheet that lists all of the principals by board member district and they years of experience they have.

The retreat agenda has a few other interesting items that I will write about proposed magnets at McNair and Irving Park elementary schools; an update on the land purchase for the southeast area elementary school; new policies regarding booster clubs and donations, and an update on a proposal to produce biodiesel in the district. Check out the related documents at the link.

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Tags: Agenda, school board, principals

Posted by Morgan Josey Glover on Thursday, January 19, 2012 at 4:14 pm

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retiree

January 19, 2012 - 5:56 pm EST

I've dealt with turnover stats in the past in business (employment) and I can't understand how do you draw any conclusions from the data on that spreadsheet. What you need to identify a beginning period of time (e.g., Aug to July) and identify the number of principals who were on staff in August (beginning of the year) and the number that were on staff at the end (July 30). You can do that for the whole system and also break it down by district too. Maybe another way to look at it would be to see which Area Supt had the highest turnover of their subordinate staff and look at the reasons why those principals left.

Morgan Josey Glover

January 20, 2012 - 10:12 am EST

There is a chart that ran with the story that showed principal turnover by school year from 2006-07 to 2010-11. There was a clear trend toward principals remaining in their schools longer. You can view that chart in today's paper. The district also shows turnover rates using a different baseline (with similar results) in the retreat agenda documents. I think what the chart you referred to best shows is that some of the most vocal board members (i.e. Amos Quick) have had slightly better experience levels in their districts than others. Look at Kris Cooke's and Jeff Belton's districts, for example.

retiree

January 21, 2012 - 11:06 am EST

The chart you provided in Excel still does not have any relevance to the members on the board. The way I looked at the data and read the story it appeared to try and show some degree of correlation between principal tenure versus members of the board. On the other hand, you may have some evidence of length of experience as a principal in correlation to the district board member.

Morgan Josey Glover

January 23, 2012 - 10:59 am EST

I think you are misunderstanding the purpose of that file. I never stated or implied that a correlation existed between principal tenure and board representation. That file is really more useful for the people who have been following the board discussion about administrative turnover in certain districts. See this March blog post for some context: http://snipurl.com/21umr66

Even then I wanted to know if high turnover rates were concentrated in different schools or regions of the district or consistent throughout. The file just shows which areas of the district have more or less leadership stability, thus proving or disproving board members' perceptions about turnover in their communities. Keep in mind that HR provided this file to school board members at their request last fall.

angie123

January 19, 2012 - 8:22 pm EST

The numbers are much lower than I would have imagined.

One principal's stats are glaringly different from all others - the principal at Ragsdale has been there for 19 years! People in Jamestown have always commented that the Ragsdale family controls that school and it's also rumored that what happens at Ragsdale stays at Ragsdale.