Credit: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Polaris

LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner dances with Canterbury Artery Elementary Schoolhouse first graders on April 20, 2021, in Arleta.

Credit: Brian van der Brug/Los Angeles Times/Polaris

LAUSD Superintendent Austin Beutner dances with Canterbury Avenue Elementary School beginning graders on Apr twenty, 2021, in Arleta.

Update: On April 23, the school board named Megan Reilly, the commune's currrent deputy superintendent of business services and operations, to succeed Austin Beutner every bit interim superintendent.

The resignation of Los Angeles Unified Superintendent Austin Beutner has raised the specter of whether the pandemic will contribute to an accelerating pace of turnover in the leadership of the country's and the nation's schoolhouse districts.

Superintendent turnover is a fact of life, peculiarly in big urban districts, and especially in Los Angeles Unified. By the stop of this schoolhouse year, one-half of California's xxx largest districts will have new superintendents, compared to those in place in 2017.

But education leaders worry that the pandemic will lead to a further outflow.

Just a mean solar day before Beutner sent a alphabetic character to the Board of Didactics announcing his resignation, his Twitter account gave no inkling of what he was planning. It showed Beutner dancing along with kids and riding a tricycle at a school campus that had just opened for in-person didactics — something that few had predicted would happen during the current school twelvemonth.

So why would he resign at just the moment when things seem to be turning the corner both on the pandemic front, and afterwards overcoming huge challenges early in his tenure, including a biting teachers strike?

In an interview with EdSource, Beutner best-selling that "without question" the pressures of the pandemic played a role in his resignation — on top of the multiple pressures that existed beforehand.

"It has been 15-hr days, vii days a week for more than than a year, and quite frankly, for virtually three years," he said. "I'1000 unfortunately or fortunately wired that mode. I understand when I accept on a delivery, I will do what I have to do to make sure I evangelize on my cease."

He said that the board had tried to convince him to stay on and offered to extend his contract, which was due to expire in June. "At that place was unanimity (on the lath) on that," he said.

But he declined their offering, he said. "I served my time, and I recollect this is the right time to transition," he said. "I don't think me staying for six months or a year would make a difference."

He said he had to balance his own responsibilities with those of the school district. "I'm a son; I'm a husband; I'k a father. I have four children," he said. One of his children is a high schoolhouse junior, and two are in college. They had to bargain with the distance learning challenges, both individually and every bit a family unit.

The pandemic has increased the pressures on superintendents immeasurably, says Carl Cohn, the erstwhile superintendent of Long Beach Unified and San Diego Unified, who has mentored numerous superintendents throughout California.

"People are admittedly exhausted in this role," he said. The emergence of the parent-driven "open schools" move has exacerbated the state of affairs, he said, "where a sinister motivation is ascribed to your every move."

"I don't recollect I have seen that before," he said. "That takes a huge price on a superintendent trying to meet both public wellness demands and the desire to become kids dorsum to schoolhouse for in-person learning."

Becca Bracy Knight, executive director of The Broad Center, which runs professional person development programs for current and aspiring urban school organization leaders, echoed that view. "Add to the logistical challenges of a pandemic on top of the overwhelming logistical challenges of just running a district in a normal year, and it becomes especially daunting," she said.

Pedro Noguera, dean of the USC Rossier School of Instruction, said he was shocked that Beutner was leaving at this moment, having overcome major challenges early on in his tenure. "I idea he was in a great position to make some real changes," calculation that Beutner came into the position not to "maintain the condition quo" just to be "a change maker and to brand a divergence."

Noguera believes that the pressures from strong teachers' unions and pressures from full-time salaried board members, who themselves have a staff of half dozen or 7, make the Los Angeles Unified superintendency especially challenging.

Beutner said that while he has had a "good, collaborative" human relationship with the lath, and dealing with information technology "wasn't a gene in the timing of this decision; it's a factor for anyone who is superintendent of L.A. Unified."

He noted that he has a staff of about 10, while the school lath collectively has a combined staff of 55 or 60.

He said that achieving "office clarity" was especially important in any superintendent's job.

"It would be an interesting exercise for all boards, not just 50.A. Unified, to conspicuously define what they believe their role to be and the role of the superintendent," he said. "And that ought to be shared publicly."

John Rogers, a UCLA professor of educational activity, says that if Beutner was going to leave, in some means leaving now "makes some sense."

Beutner, who came to the position with background in finance and philanthropy, is not an educator, which was one of the criticisms of the determination by the board to hire him three years ago.

Merely he has done an impressive job managing the district through the pandemic crisis, Rogers said: "His skill sets were best matched to the job before him, centering on logistics."

Beutner should be given credit for the massive job of getting devices to all students, for example, and "the moral vision" for ensuring students and families had access to meals — 123 million of them during the pandemic.

"I am sure he is extraordinarily tired," Rogers said.

In fact, Rogers said, Beutner may be mirroring what nigh everyone in the district is experiencing to some caste or another.

"Across the organisation, at that place is a adept deal of fatigue at this moment that nosotros demand to account for," he said. That includes students, parents and teachers, besides equally principals. "I think that 1 of the tasks across the system moving frontward is going to exist how to restart and bring new energy, when all the calls are to do more than, with all the additional resources, just how do you lot practice that when people are feeling stretched already?"

David Tokofsky, a sometime schoolhouse lath member and informal adviser to current ones, said that he wished that Beutner would stay on.

"In that location is no question in my mind that if he would stay for 7 years or a decade, the place would be meliorate off," he said. "The district has more money than anyone could imagine. In that location is a once in a lifetime chance to keep turbulence and the rhetoric of disruption down. Anybody knows his foibles, only he was doing well for the betterment of all of its kids."

Asked if at that place is anything the board could offer him annihilation to stay on, forth the lines of what the board did in San Francisco when it recently convinced its superintendent Vincent Matthews to rescind his resignation, Beutner demurred.

"If nosotros can make it work, I aspire to throw out the kickoff pitch for the Dodgers," he quipped, suggesting that his mind is fabricated upward.

Equally for achieving the continuity in leadership that has eluded the district for many years, he encouraged the lath to select someone already in a leadership office in the commune to keep the piece of work he started that had shown results, including the Principal Promise, promoting reading in kindergarten through 2nd form.

"1 of the things that I'm proud of is nosotros've brought up the next generation, put them in positions of responsibility throughout the schoolhouse district," he said. "And they're doing fantastic work."

EdSource author Betty Márquez Rosales and John Fensterwald contributed to this story.

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