The Complexities of Pairing Principal and School : Education: Should positions be rotated on a regular basis? What about parent input? Continuity? Supt. Tom Payzant, for one, has changed the way he views reassignment.

By all accounts, Virginia Foster had done an excellent job running Morse High School in Encanto for the past seven years and had no desire to move to another site.

But earlier this month, when San Diego city schools Supt. Tom Payzant and school board trustees rejected the three finalists among applicants for the top post at troubled Lincoln High, Payzant phoned Foster on the morning of the board meeting to tell her she was being moved there.

While Foster’s switch was only one of dozens made during the annual spasm of principal reassignments announced over the past two months, it enjoyed special visibility among several surprise transfers because both Lincoln and Morse are home to a significant number of the district’s nonwhite students whose academic achievement lags unacceptably behind state and county averages.

Eyebrows were also raised because Payzant has promised Foster he will discuss a bonus plan as part of her new post, his trial balloon to push individual contracts for principals at selected schools, in contrast to present policies for uniform pay based on enrollment.

She also is being permitted to take her administrative assistant, her head counselor, a resource teacher, her ROTC instructor and a vice principal to Lincoln, considerations almost unheard of when transfers occur.

As such, Foster’s unexpected transfer symbolizes the complex nature of principal selection, principal transfer and principal demotion in the nation’s eighth-largest urban school system.

Should principals be rotated regularly no matter what kind of job--good or mediocre--they have done in their present assignments? Should changes be made in salary scales that automatically reward principals at larger schools?

What about the increasing demand by parents and teachers for a say in who comes to their school? What to do with administrators trained as managers at a time when new conditions demand leadership in improving instruction and helping teachers adapt to a wider range of student preparation?

“Candidly, we’d like to have more continuity, but people also want to make more money, we have deaths and retirements, we have some principals whom we can’t figure out what to do with--it’s not always easy to get the right fit,” school board President Kay Davis said.

Payzant, about to enter his ninth year as district superintendent--the longest tenure of his 22-year career--has changed his view of how to handle principal assignments.

No longer does he believe principals should be rotated among the district’s 170-some schools every three to four years, just for the sake of change, as he strongly felt when he arrived in 1982.

The critical need for schools to create strong parent-school ties, to experiment with educational reforms and stimulate better teaching--these and other requirements for creative leaders argue for greater longevity as well as improved principal training and ongoing reassessment, Payzant said.

But he concedes that, despite his high hopes for quicker change, the reality of a district with multiethnic demands, wide-ranging student achievement and uneven administrative talent has so far resulted in only halting progress.

“Where possible, I would like more stability and continuity for principals,” Payzant said. “But you’re always faced with having to weigh the needs of a particular school and the entire district against the wishes of an individual employee, and to strike the best balance among conflicting views.”

He emphasized that his administrators are still told they are principals within the San Diego Unified School District, “and not principals of a particular school.”

In the case of Foster, Payzant said the veteran’s leadership abilities were needed at Lincoln after trustees decided that the three finalists, all vice principals, should not be given as their first assignment a school with the toughest socioeconomics of any site in the district.

Foster was identified as one of the few black district principals who could move forward with programs at Lincoln, long considered an educational symbol for the black Southeast San Diego community.

“I didn’t give her a choice because if you do that, you have to be willing to accept ‘no,’ and I wasn’t willing in this case,” Payzant said. While Foster has a longstanding policy of not talking to the press, several associates said privately that she was not thrilled by the transfer.

Payzant said he told her that “if she had a similar situation” to his, she would do the right thing. “And she laughed,,” he said. “There’s always going to be tension if you really believe you ought to have your best principals in the toughest schools when some of those people may not want those positions.”

But the superintendent, in a move related to his push for fundamental changes, has offered Foster incentives in exchange for her acceptance of the transfer. Such site-based incentives could include a bonus plan based on her accomplishment of specific objectives, Payzant said.

“We’re talking about something in the range of $3,000 to $4,000, money in return for accomplishing objectives at Lincoln,” he said. “And yes, some administrators might not like this at all because they are leery of performance-based bonuses.

“But I think as part of our whole restructuring effort, we should open up our thinking in response to incentives.”

That restructuring--under which the district hopes to give principals, teachers and parents more decision-making power and accountability at individual schools--is already leading to some changes in the selection process.

Numerous schools where the former principal retired or died have taken advantage of a new district policy that allows teachers and parents to participate in interviews of applicants for these so-called “first-order” vacancies.

Maruta Gardner, principal at Mann Middle School for the past six years, was asked by several teachers at Mission Bay High to apply after their principal retired. Gardner said she had been interested in moving to a high school, but would have stayed at Mann if her superiors could have guaranteed that she would not have been moved to another school against her wishes. They made no such guarantee this past spring, when the first soundings are made annually among administrators as to what moves might be forthcoming.

“If I am going to move, I want to go to a place that I really want to be at,” Gardner said. “Just waking up one morning and finding out that you are going to a new school, after putting your heart and soul in a job you like, that’s not the best way to do things.”

Gardner believes that principals chosen through restructuring must be allowed to stay at a school longer than in past years in order to move programs forward and repay the trust shown in them by parents and teachers.

“And all the research tells me that you need at least four to five years to put programs into place, to get a school on track,” Gardner said. “So if people are moving every three to four years, that’s counterproductive to everything being said now.”

However, the size of the district mitigates against a rapid reduction of wholesale rotations because of what Payzant calls “backfill” and others call “dominoes,” the filling of the posts vacated when principals are promoted or otherwise moved to positions left empty by retirement or death.

Principals for the backfill posts have traditionally been plucked from schools without interviews or bids, based only on what assistant superintendents believe would be good combinations of administrator and site, as well as a way to punish or reward.

Former Crawford High Principal Nancy Shelburne, now a district administrator, recalled walking into a trustee meeting one Tuesday afternoon to receive an award for excellence for her two years of leadership at Bell Junior High. “And while getting the award, they said, ‘By the way, you’re being moved to Crawford,’ ” she said.

This year, for example, after the principal at Grant successfully applied for the post at McKinley Elementary, Payzant and his assistants moved the principal from Fremont Elementary to Grant, the principal from Silver Gate to Fremont, the principal from Kennedy to Silver Gate and promoted a vice principal from Florence to principal at Kennedy. Some of the moves were promotions, some were lateral transfers and others were warnings to those judged to be doing poorly.

Payzant did allow two schools with backfill vacancies this year to conduct interviews first with prospective principals, but he said that to allow teacher/parent participation at all schools with vacancies would slow down the process unacceptably.

“As more and more schools want a say (in selection), it’s going to get harder to handle each year because you always reach a point in the calendar where we’ve got to have principals in place,” he said, noting that it can take up to six months to fill a vacancy by going through the complete notification and interview process.

In addition, there could be some principals wanting to move--or some whom Payzant wants to move--who would prove unacceptable to parents and teachers at any school. “We’ve got to place those principals somewhere” because current policies almost foreclose demotions back to the classroom, Payzant said.

A majority of principals at small schools who perform well generally want to move up to sites with larger enrollments because that means more money, said Cathy Hopper, a longtime principal and assistant superintendent who retired in July.

“And for lousy principals, they are never going to be moved up to a larger school, so they just get moved around from small school to small school,” Hopper said, referring to longstanding district policies of not giving bigger schools to principals with poor records.

“So some small schools that are among the toughest to lead in the district end up with a new principal every three years and don’t show the academic or leadership growth that they deserve.”

Hopper allowed Barry Bernstein, considered one of the district’s better elementary principals, to stay an extra year at Torrey Pines in order to nurture several important curriculum and race-relations programs new to the school, at a time when Bernstein had been tagged by Payzant for a bigger school needing his expertise and enthusiasm.

“He suffered financially (for a year), but he wanted to stay,” Hopper said of Bernstein, now principal at Horton Elementary, a school with one of the largest enrollments and a variety of academic programs.

Said Bernstein, “I believe that five to seven years could make it easier to develop stronger relationships with parents as well as gain the confidence of teachers and students . . . but I can also say that purposeful and planned transitions can help produce better principals as well.”

But in too many cases, administrators concede, principals learn of their transfer to a school of which they know little or nothing about, and are forced to undertake a crash course during the summer to know at least the names of their new teachers by September. The time line is shortened further for those principals assigned to the increasing number of year-round schools.

The iconoclastic superintendent of the 12-school South Bay elementary district in Imperial Beach moves his principals around on five-year rotations, but sits down with each one and discusses why they are being moved to a particular school and what he wants them to try in their new position.

“You don’t just leave someone largely to his or her devices without any specific plan,” Philip Grignon said. “I watch each school, I know the strengths and weaknesses of each principal, so I’m not just moving them around for the hell of it” or basing the changes just on intuition.

“After five years, I think most principals have done the magic they can at a particular school, and so it’s nice to bring in someone with a different perspective. But we remain a centralized district with a strong academic focus, and no school is going to go from pillar to post,” Grignon said.

“One principal may be good at improving a school through his or her personality, while another who has strong organizational skills will work well at a school needing less of the personal touch. . . . The bottom line still has to be better student results.”