Superintendents’ Offspring

The unique stresses of being a student where your parent runs the school system

Whether the school district is large or small, almost everyone knows who the superintendent is. That also can mean everyone knows who the superintendent’s family is. It can be a little like living in the proverbial fishbowl. Someone’s always watching.

The effects can be especially noticeable among a superintendent’s children who are enrolled in the schools that their parent is leading.

“If you’re a superintendent’s kid, that’s part of your identity, whether or not you like it,” says Rachel White, founder of The Superintendent Lab and an associate professor of educational leadership and policy at the University of Texas at Austin. “You can’t hide it for the most part.”

Even in relatively placid circumstances, the superintendent’s children always are under a little more pressure, a little more scrutiny than other children. In tougher times, when controversial matters are in the public sphere, the situation can be quite stressful. On the positive side, being the child of the superintendent can be a motivator for children to work hard and succeed in school and beyond.

Educators who have raised children while working in the superintendency say it’s possible to be successful at both, though not easy. And it does take some deliberate effort.

High-Visibility Effects

A superintendency is inherently a high-visibility job, especially if you live in the school district where you work, which is true for the vast majority of superintendents today. As Matt Montgomery, superintendent since 2021 of the Lake Forest School Districts 67 and 115 in the Chicago suburbs and the father of four school-aged children puts it, you give up some privacy when you take on this kind of high-profile position.

Scott Rocco, superintendent of the Hamilton Township School District in Hamilton, N.J., says his family often joked that they couldn’t go out to dinner without someone recognizing them. “The kids and my wife would just keep walking. They were used to it,” he says. “That’s just part of living in the town where you’re superintendent.”

The stresses of a parent’s high-profile job in the public sector can lead to pressures on their children, although several leading researchers in the education field say that no studies to date have tracked this phenomenon as it relates to public school leaders.

Last August, the U.S. Surgeon General released an advisory called Parents Under Pressure that noted that the well-being of parents and the health of their children are directly linked. “The stresses parents and caregivers have today are being passed to children in direct and indirect ways, impacting families and communities across America,” the report stated.

Recognizing the likelihood of pressure on family members can give pause to someone considering a superintendency, especially when parenting school-age children and residing in the community being served. “I worried about people treating my children differently — or my wife,” says Mike Lubelfeld, superintendent of North Shore School District 112 in suburban Chicago, who eventually did take the leap and the job.

Impactful Decisions

A superintendent’s decisions in the public sphere can affect a superintendent’s children in very real ways.

Scott Ripley took on the role of superintendent of the High Point Regional High School in Wantage, N.J., in 2013 when his children were still young and just starting their school lives. He already had worked in the district for 16 years, but he hadn’t anticipated how hard the top job would be. He found himself wondering if there were times when some people took out their frustration with him on his children.

Superintendents don’t work in a vacuum. They make decisions that affect their employees and students, but their decisions can affect their own children, too. People talk, and in the age of ever-present social media. Just about everything winds up online, including the stomach-churning.

“If you’re a principal or a superintendent, you have to make difficult decisions that make some people unhappy, and that could reach down negatively to your kids,” says organizational psychologist Stewart Friedman, director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Aware of Scrutiny

Younger children might not be fully aware of the stakes of having a parent in a high-profile leadership role, but they often become clear for older children.

Greg Denecker became superintendent of Bluffton Exempted Village Schools in Ohio when his sons were elementary school age or younger. His younger son Luke, now 22, remembers feeling that teachers kept an especially close watch on him when he was younger.

“I knew it would be going back to him immediately if I misbehaved or anything,” says Luke, a recent college graduate working in the finance industry in Columbus, Ohio.

He deliberately chose to keep a low profile in high school because he didn’t want to make any missteps that might affect his dad. “If it reflected poorly on him as a parent, it could spill into what people think of him in his job,” he says.

Nicole Ekstrom was a sophomore in high school when her mother, Nadine Ekstrom, became a superintendent in western Massachusetts. Even though Nicole and her older sister Meaghan didn’t attend school in that district, they still were conscious of how people would see them, now that their mom was a public figure.

“I felt like we were always being cautious about what we were saying or who we were talking to,” says Nicole, now 30 and married.

Adds her sister Meaghan, 32: “With social media, it doesn’t matter where you live.”

COVID’s Effects

In the past, a superintendent might have faced some good-natured ribbing for cancelling school (or not cancelling it) on a winter day with snow falling. And like other superintendents’ kids, Luke Denecker remembers his classmates teasing him about it in central Ohio.

“Whenever there was a little bit of snow and school didn’t get cancelled or delayed, it was automatic that I’d go to school and I’d hear about it,” he says.

But when COVID-19 hit, superintendents had to decide whether to cancel in-person schooling for a month, a semester or even longer. They were making decisions about attendance, going hybrid versus staying virtual, masking and whether or not to hold extracurricular activities.

“COVID was this point in time where people really realized how much power superintendents had, because they were making these really visible decisions,” says White, founder of The Superintendency Lab.

Many of those decisions generated criticism of superintendents, and the effect trickled down to their children in many cases.

Sophia Cabral, 18, recently graduated from high school in the Taunton Public Schools in Massachusetts where her father, John J. Cabral, is in his seventh year as superintendent. During the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, she encountered criticism of her father’s handling of the public health crisis, leading her to feel defensive toward friends and others.

“It’s a different type of anger because it’s protective,” she says.

Sophia shared her feelings with her mother, about how hurtful it was to see negative posts on social media or overhear critical remarks at school. But she says she realized, “You can’t comment on it and make it more of a thing.”

For the Denecker family in Ohio, any fallout from closing schools was somewhat minimized, in part because Luke was in the senior class of 2020  and didn’t get to have a traditional high school graduation, a disappointment to many families and their graduating seniors.

“I think that probably did help me at the time. Nobody could say you don’t really care about that,” says Greg Denecker, the superintendent. “Nobody could say, ‘It wasn’t your kid.’ It was my kid.”

Minimizing Impact

Children may not always admit how they’re affected by their parent’s position, so their parents might not be aware of it.

“I don’t think we talk about the effects on family and the stress because they don’t talk about it. They just get quiet and fall in line,” says David Axner, executive director of the Buckeye Association of School Administrators in Ohio. “Superintendent kids are soldiers. They’ll be the ones who listen and follow the rules, but they may not enjoy it.”

In fact, now that his own kids are older, they’ve opened up about it. “They just laugh about it now, but they said, ‘Dad, I just kept my head down,’” says Axner, who has six children and spent 14 years as a superintendent in several school districts. “They said, ‘It was really hard. I just didn’t want to get in trouble because you were the superintendent and it would look bad.”

Based on his role directing a work/life balance project at the Wharton School, Friedman suggests public school administrators remember the fundamental aspect of organizational leadership is being responsive to what people need — and that applies to their own children. They can acknowledge that their jobs are stressful for themselves and for their children. Then they can open up a conversation to find out what kind of supports their children want and need to cope.

“Which usually means finding out how they’re feeling and then finding ways to help them understand their feelings,” Friedman says, adding that the next step is discerning practical strategies for support.

Lubelfeld, in suburban Chicago, recommends superintendents deliberately prepare their kids in advance for the possibility of hearing or reading negative comments about their parents. Part of that process should entail explaining it doesn’t make someone a bad person if they disagree with the superintendent.

“Let me know if you are uncomfortable, but please know that it’s okay for people to disagree with dad,” he suggests saying.

Based on what she observed of her mother’s work as a superintendent in three upstate New York school systems, Madison Zehr, 20, also has some advice for children of superintendents who may encounter criticism: Remain calm and think carefully about how to respond.

“You can’t control what other people are going to do, only what you do,” says Madison, whose mother, Mary-Margaret Zehr, was an assistant superintendent and then superintendent in her school district while she was growing up.

“You’ve got to take the higher ground at all times,” agrees Mary-Margaret Zehr. “And you have to raise your children to understand the realities of the world around you and also to remain safe.”

A Parent First

A mentor once talked to Aaron Spence early in his career when one of Spence’s children was encountering some problems at school.

“He told me, ‘You only get one chance to get it right with your kids, and that obligation to be their parent doesn’t stop just because you became an administrator,’” says Spence, now superintendent of Loudoun County Public Schools in Ashburn, Va. “I took that to heart. So I’ve always remembered that I’m a parent first and an administrator second.”

Being a parent first when your responsibilities range widely for hundreds or thousands of children in a school community can be challenging, however.

“There are time constraints,” notes Edward Bouquillon, a retired superintendent in Massachusetts. “A lot of times, you’re torn between going to your own kids’ sport events and going to ones you’re the superintendent for. You’ve just got to allocate your time as evenly as you can.”

Nadine Ekstrom’s daughters, Meaghan and Nicole, remember her spending a lot of evenings in meetings in her job as superintendent when they were teenagers..

“It was hard when we were 16 and 18 and we were close to going off to college, and we missed those dinnertime conversations,” Meaghan says. But there was an upside to having a parent in a position of leadership. “It really did teach us a good work ethic to see mom working so hard.”

John Cabral says he never wanted his children to feel any pressure to perform or act a certain way because of his status. “I want them to have as normal of a high school experience as possible,” he says. “To them, I just want to be ‘Dad,’ not the superintendent.”

His daughter, Sophia, a student at Northeastern University in Boston, says her father never put pressure on her but she wanted to do well anyway. Her role as the daughter of the superintendent was a good motivator to succeed in school. “It helped me live up to the expectations.”