Written by Harmon Krause

In the last two years, 60 principals walked away from their positions in a Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) school, affecting 19% of the schools (J. Rademan, personal communication, October 9, 2019). These principals either resigned, retired, or took non-principal positions. The WELS school system cannot sustain these losses.

I was one of those casualties. In particular, I struggled to maximize my Administrative Release Time (ART). ART is the time that schools release principals from teaching to focus on administrative tasks. I wasn’t open and transparent about how I used my ART, and that caused friction and trust issues between my staff and me.

For me and many other principals who teach and serve as principal, issues of administrative release time (ART) are critical. My master’s thesis sought to expand on previous research about ART conducted by Schmill (2009) and Meyer et al (2015). Here’s what I learned.

Principals and teachers are not on the same page about administrative release time.
For principals, only 12% reported being able to complete their administrative tasks during their allotted release time (Krause, 2019), and 77% said they need more ART (Meyer et al, 2015). However, 42% of teachers believe their principal has enough release time to do their work, and only 45% agree that principals should have more ART (Krause, 2019).

This disconnect seems to result from a lack of communication and transparency. Teachers have little idea what principals actually do with their time. While most (58%) think principals use ART for administrative tasks, some simply see them in their office (21%), and others report (28%) having no idea what the principal does with his time. Only 43% reported that the principal uses his time for classroom observations.

Principals need more ART than they receive.
Few teaching principals in Lutheran schools get the amount of ART they need to lead the school well. In my study, 88% of the principals indicated they need more ART to complete their tasks (Krause, 2019). Principals reported spending an average of 26.5 hours per week on administration but receiving only 15.2 hours of release time from teaching to do principal work. This prevents principals from doing important instructional leadership activities, like visiting classrooms, during the school day. Sadly, less than half (48%) of the principals believe their congregation would support their request for more ART.

Schools use a variety of ART models.
About 8% of the principals report that they teach full-time and receive no ART. Other schools (7%) use volunteer teachers to provide ART. Another common approach is having principals do administrative duties while a pastor is teaching Catechism class in his room (33%). Principals say these are mostly ineffective models (Krause, 2019).

Many principals (54%) indicated they pay a parent or teacher to provide time away from the classroom for administration, and 21% said that they had no teaching responsibilities at all. Of the principals who used a paid parent or teacher, 40% felt effective with their ART. When compared to the 75% of responding principals who felt effective with full ART (full-time principals), there is a reason to be concerned (Krause, 2019, p. 73). Providing a principal with enough time to be effective comes with a cost.

Something needs to change.
My 2019 study revealed a staggering statistic. While 47% of WELS principals do see themselves as principals in five years with their current ART, 31% do not (Krause, 2019, p. 70). This data suggests an unsustainable paradigm and may explain the many principal exits we saw these past two years. One way Lutheran schools can reduce the principal vacancies is to provide more quality ART.

Conclusions
The current state of the WELS principalship is not something to take lightly. The amount of ART has improved over the past several years (Schmill, 2009; Meyer et al., 2015; & Krause, 2019); however, many changes and improvements still need to be made. I made several recommendations in my 2019 study.

1. Schools need to find room in the budget to provide more ART for their principal.
2. Teachers need to have a better understanding of what the principal does.
3. Principals need to be trained on how to maximize their ART and provide transparency on how they use it.
4. Support for WELS principals in congregations and among teachers must grow.

CLICK HERE to read Harmon’s complete thesis, “Administrative Release Time in Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) Schools.”

Harmon Krause (’14, MS Ed Admin ’19) is taking a sabbatical from ministry to begin studying for a Doctorate of Education at Concordia University Portland.

References
Krause, H. (2019). Administrative release time in Wisconsin Evangelical Lutheran Synod (WELS) schools (master’s thesis). Martin Luther College, New Ulm MN.

Meyer, J., Treptow, E., Rademan, J., Sievert, J., & Brown, E. (2015). The WELS principal position: Time, training, and compensation. P. 1-62.

Schmill, G. R. (2009). ART for school principals of the WELS (unpublished master’s thesis). Concordia University Wisconsin.