Politics and change: Why Seattle Public Schools' superintendent is stepping down

When Seattle Public Schools Superintendent Brent Jones announced he’s leaving the district this fall, he said the decision came from a desire to spend time with family.

But Jones also acknowledges that last fall’s explosive school closure conversations — along with the myriad other stressors that have come with leading Washington’s largest public school system — “absolutely” played a role in his decision, too.

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“These four years have been challenging,” Jones told KUOW in an interview Friday. “It’s been tough. It’s also been rewarding.”

When Jones took the helm of the district as interim superintendent in 2021, schools were in the throes of the pandemic, and had been in remote learning for more than a year. Within his first few months on the job, Jones dealt with the logistics — and politics — of reopening the schools.

There was the week-long teacher strike, multiple incidents of gun violence in and around schools, and hanging over it all, the district’s ongoing financial woes, which led the district to consider proposals to close up to 21 schools. The plan was later pared down to four schools — then dropped entirely, after months of intense public blowback.

So, although Jones is looking forward to moving to southern California, where his wife has an exciting new job opportunity, “it’s also time for me to hand over the reins,” he said.

Still, leaving Seattle is bittersweet for Jones. His mom taught in the district, he graduated from Franklin High School, and his daughter is also an SPS graduate.

“I have mixed emotions about this. This is the district I grew up in,” he said. “So I’ve taken this on as a badge of honor, to be able to go through the turbulence, to go through the different things, but I feel confident that I’ve left it all on the table.”

The Seattle School Board will formally launch the search for the district’s next leader this week. It’ll be the district’s fourth superintendent search since 2014.

High superintendent turnover isn’t a uniquely Seattle issue. Across the nation, turnover among leaders of public K-12 school districts spiked during the pandemic — and that attrition rate has yet to return to pre-pandemic levels.

During the 2023-24 academic year, 20% of the nation’s 500 largest school districts replaced their superintendent, according to a September 2024 analysis by the ILO Group, a consulting firm that advocates for increasing the number of women in educational leadership positions.

“There’s so many challenges with urban education, so many challenges with trying to stand up systems,” Jones said. “You have lots of people advising you, whether you’re asking them for that advice or not, and there’s lots of demands that are being made on superintendents.”

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High superintendent turnover is also not unique to urban school districts.

In Washington state, about 23% of all K-12 districts — big and small, rural and urban — had a superintendent transition between 2022-23 and 2023-24, according to research from the Superintendent Lab. And since 2019-20, 60% of Washington districts have had turnover in this position.

“Superintendent retention, superintendent support — I think it’s time we re-look at that,” Jones said. “What can one person really do? How do we wrap around superintendents with relevant and tangible supports? How do we take the position of superintendent and not make it so mythological?”

Research suggests these challenges have gotten worse as education has become increasingly political in recent years.

A 2023 survey of 150 superintendents by the RAND Corporation found nearly 80% of respondents reported frequent work-related stress. And the top reason? Politics.

Jones has seen that firsthand when talking to fellow superintendents.

“Some can weather those storms — some are really good and politically astute,” he said. “But some are challenged with staying focused on student outcomes, staying focused on what student needs are. And then there’s a collision with adults’ wants, wishes, desires, needs, fears, and concerns that they have to balance.”

And Jones himself has struggled with that, too. In fact, he’d go so far as to say politics have been the biggest challenge he’s faced during his tenure as superintendent — but not necessarily in the traditional red versus blue sense. It’s more of an intensity of public opinion about school priorities and leadership.

He knew politics would come with being superintendent. But Jones said he didn’t realize quite how intense it could be — especially starting the job in the midst of Covid, when public schools across the country were at the center of heated debates about masking and reopening.

Although the pandemic has wound down since then, that intensity has remained.

Jones pointed to an example last month, when the district took learning online, rather than calling a snow day. District leaders thought it was a good idea, Jones said, “because we learned how to do that in Covid.”

“But some people took exception to that, because we’re denying a child of playing in the snow for a day with these rare snow days,” he said. “So even something as benign as flipping to remote has a political element to it — but we meet people where they are and try to be responsive.”

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Politics have also applied to conversations about budget cuts and school consolidation.

That, Jones said, brought him the biggest lesson from his time on the job.

“In a political climate, everything that we do is amplified on the news or on the radio or people write about it and, you know, lots of people are critics of what’s happening,” Jones said. “But how do you manage through that? How do you keep the main thing the main thing? How do you bring people along? How do you give people reassurance?”

Another part of it, Jones said, is knowing when to push for change and when to slow down or pivot completely. When it came to school closures, there was a moment where he realized it was time to stop pushing.

“We got to a point where this isn’t going to work right now, so let’s pause, let’s regroup, and then maybe come at it in a different way at a different time,” Jones said. “Being wise about where the community is, being wise about what kind of tolerance for change people have, being wise about where our mistakes were, and then being responsive to that is leadership.”

And Jones had his own moment like that — when he decided it was time to step down as superintendent.

"I've come to an intuitive kind of point that it’s time to hand off,” he said. “It's not out of spite or anything like that. It's just time."

Jones takes heart in his belief that he’s leaving the district in good shape when he hands it off to the next leader. But he has some advice for his successor: Keep the community engaged, and harness the city’s love for neighborhood schools for good.

Jones pointed to the support for the district’s two most recent levies as evidence. Both passed easily with over 70% of the vote.

“It's time for the community to say ‘we're going to take ownership, we're going to protect our schools, we're going to try to support our schools in any type of way that they need to help move the needle on behalf of students,'” Jones said.

“The next person should come in and seize this momentum and really say, ‘Here’s what you can do for your school district, here’s what you can do for your local schools.'”

The school board is scheduled to meet at 3 p.m. Tuesday at the John Stanford Center for Educational Excellence.