Unfair targets: superintendents' offspring: school-age children cope with exaggerated expectations and hurtful criticism because of their unique status.

Most people think the children of American presidents live under a microscope.

But at least they have Secret Service agents and a cadre of other adults shielding them from the glare of the public eye.

Superintendents' school-age children have no such luxuries. Just ask Sarah and Leah Boniface.

Now 20-year-old college sophomores, the twins entered high school the year their mother, Rose Marie Boniface, took over the top job in the Marlborough, Mass., school district. Although they already were students in the 5,000-student district 26 miles west of Boston, where their mother has spent her entire career, attitudes toward them changed once they were perceived as children of privilege.

Overnight, it seemed, the expectations teachers held of Boniface's daughters escalated. People assumed they should perform better academically merely because their mother was the superintendent. "It was difficult for them," says Boniface, 55. "Clearly that became apparent to me early on."

The Boniface girls weren't anticipating that change or another, more bothersome, transformation. In an instant, students and teachers alike saw them as conduits of information to their mother. If she failed to call off school when it snowed, Sarah and Leah took the brunt. If a teacher had a bone to pick with Boniface, he or she sometimes rode the twins harder than the other students, they said. The girls hardly ever received invitations to big parties either--something they chalked up to their peers worrying they'd tattle on any wrongdoing.

And always they felt they had to work a little harder than everyone else to live up to an unstated expectation of perfection, says Sarah Boniface, now a student, along with Leah, at Regis College in Weston, Mass. "I thought we had to try extra hard to prove ourselves in school."

The low point came one snowy afternoon as the Boniface girls made their way to their car in the parking lot at Marlborough High School. Members of the school's ice hockey team, angry with the superintendent after she punished team members for breaking a school district rule, attacked the twins with snowballs.

Angry and frightened, they retreated to the school office.

Celebrity Phenomenon

When Rose Marie Boniface talks about those times, her voice is full of remorse. It's still painful to think those things happened to her girls in the district where she's worked for 34 years. Yet unpleasantness aside, the girls never seriously wished another career upon their mother, they said.

"She apologized to us," Sarah Boniface says. "I know she felt bad about it, but we were proud of her for having that position. We wouldn't have wanted her not to do the job because of us."

Such is the lot of many superintendents' school-age children. They are proud of the important role their parents play in the life of their schools while yearning to be just like the other children.

To be sure, growing up the child of a school superintendent has its upsides. There are certain perks, such as never having to worry when you forget your lunch money and having your parent hand you your high school diploma. But there's plenty of pressure, both internally and externally, to act just right so as never to draw undue attention to the family.

The children of school superintendents are not unlike those of politicians or other celebrities, psychologist Charles Figley says. If the word "celebrity" means someone well-known and powerful within a community, then superintendents certainly fit the bill.

"It's a powerful position," says Figley, who has studied the stress levels of celebrity families, focusing on how those families deal with the loss of privacy. "They make decisions every day that affect people's lives."

And like the offspring of Hollywood celebrities or Washington politicians, the children of school superintendents are, within the school community, rarely judged on their own merits, perceived instead as walking, talking visual aides representing their parents' agenda, says Figley, founder and director of the Florida State University Traumatology Institute.

Identity Search

It can be especially hard for children. What adults can endure differs from that of their children. Rose Marie Boniface, for example, loathes shopping in Marlborough. Even the simplest trip to the grocery takes two or three times as long as it should because school district patrons constantly stop Boniface and expect her to chat about school matters. As a result, she shops in nearby towns whenever she can.

But for superintendents' children, solving the problem isn't as simple as choosing another school. They have to live with the hand they're dealt, bumbling along, making the same goofy choices as other children their age but often held up to ridicule when they make mistakes. And when they do err, they can wobble under the weight of their guilt, which not only makes their own lives miserable, but also their parents' lives, Figley says.

The major job of most children is searching for their own identities. But for many children of celebrities, their identity is so closely tied to their parents' that they can't easily break out of the mold. "It's growing up in a glass house," he says. "There are many more consequences to normal behavior."

A House Party

That was never so clear to Ted Blaesing than when his middle daughter threw an unsanctioned party in her parents' empty house.

Blaesing, 55, superintendent of the 9,500-student White Bear Lake Area School District northwest of St. Paul, Minn., was leading the Beloit, Wis., schools at the time. He had traveled to Iowa to visit his brother. His daughter Jennifer couldn't accompany the family to Iowa because she was in a school play so she was to spend the night at a friend's house.

Around 3 a.m., Blaesing answered a call from a Wisconsin police officer, who handed the phone to Jennifer. She blurted out the details: She had hosted a little get-together at her parents' house. It got out of hand as more kids showed up than she had planned.

"The party spun out of control," Blaesing says. "There were 20-some kids at the superintendent's house, under-age drinking, the whole deal. The officer said, 'You've got places to hide in your house that you wouldn't believe.'"

So Blaesing packed up and headed out into the wee hours for a long, stonily silent drive back to Beloit.

Then things became worse. A local newspaper reported on the police breakup of the party, and a news wire picked up the story. Pretty soon the Blaesings were fielding calls from all over the country about Jennifer's mistake.

Every teen-ager involved was a minor, so their names weren't released. But because the party happened at the superintendent's house and he had only one daughter in high school, Jennifer's name was out there. It took her a long time to live down the incident, Blaesing says.

Jennifer Blaesing Rachac, now 30 and living in the Twin Cities, is circumspect about the incident these days, though at the time it seemed the news media blitz would never cease. She remembers her mother picking her up at school and turning on the radio, which was broadcasting a story about the party. She and the others partiers ended up in court and were sentenced to rehabilitation and community service. And for months afterward, she endured pointed remarks from those around her, including many teachers, her father says.

"From a discipline perspective, it was pretty harsh," Rachac says. "I think it was kind of more, 'The superintendent's daughter had a party at his house. How dumb is that?' You're a kid, and you screw up."

Except that often, the mistakes superintendents' children make are more public than the same acts committed by the children of, say, the town banker.

Under the Spotlight

But are they really? Or do superintendents' kids just feel like they're living in the spotlight? It's probably a little of both, says Tim Sanford, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado Springs, Colo., who works with the children of ministers and missionaries.

Becky Blaesing, 33, Rachac's older sister, remembers feeling some of the poor choices she made as a student at Davenport North High School in Iowa were so obvious. She felt a spotlight was being shown on every blemish. The school, with 1,100 students, isn't small and the Davenport district is good-sized with 16,500 students. But Blaesing felt her unusual last name readily identified her as the daughter of Ted Blaesing, then an associate superintendent in the district.

"There's a feeling of you know everybody's always watching you, even if they aren't," Becky Blaesing says.

Still, when Blaesing tried to veer from the path she knew she should take, there were lots of folks telling her parents. In hindsight, that was a good thing, but at the time, "I wanted that privacy," she says.

In his counseling practice, Sanford sees many similarities between the plights of preachers' kids and superintendents' children. He is especially attuned to the unique status of superintendents' offspring because his wife, Rebecca, is the daughter of a superintendent. He says the children of clergy and superintendents sometimes feel as if everyone in their particular community--whether church or school district--is trying to parent them. And many times, these children feel their parents have time for everyone but them.

In response, these children begin to feel they should be perfect in everything they do, know the answer to every question raised in class and never make a mistake, Sanford says. They feel they're living by a set of rules not imposed on anyone else and they can't trust anyone outside their family because they know too much. With that responsibility comes the belief that their behavior can ruin their parents' career.

"These are common false beliefs, irrational thought patterns that will naturally develop unless the parents actively work at teaching the child what the truth is," Sanford says. "These are the default statements."

Occasional Benefit

They also are statements that ring familiar to many superintendents' children. R. Tyson Trice, who works in public relations in Fort Worth, grew up surrounded by educators. His mother is a teacher. His father is a principal. His stepfather is a superintendent, and his stepmother is a teacher. His grandfather was a principal and a college dean.

"I had a T-shirt that said, "My dad's the principal, but I'm the boss,'" Trice says. "I was always too embarrassed to wear it."

Trice, 25, learned early on that life would be different when your parent is in charge of school. He was cautious in his classes, hesitant to be too vocal. He always felt he knew too much about what was going on in his school because of discussions he couldn't help overhearing. But the negatives never outweighed the positives for Trice. When he needed anything, he had an adult he could go to.

There are distinct benefits to having your parent running your school district beyond the easy access to lunch money or parental signatures for permission slips.

Toni Peck, 23, Ted Blaesing's youngest daughter, found herself able to interact with school administrators on a different level than other students. She attributes that to her father, whose social group included many building and district administrators. Peck came to see them as people, not just education wonks or authority figures, as many of her friends did. In fact, one of her high school principals in White Bear Lake became a mentor she's kept to this day, Peck says.

"I never would have sought her out or had that kind of relationship with her if it hadn't been for my dad," she adds.

Her sister Becky wishes she had worked around her perceived notoriety. Now her 15-year-old daughter, Breawnna, is a student at White Bear Lake and shuns the attention she attracts by sharing a surname with her grandfather. But the unwanted attention doesn't have to be negative, Blaesing knows now.

"I wish I would have been able to use that recognition more to my benefit instead of trying to hide from it," Blaesing says.

These days, as the parent of three children in the White Bear Lake schools, Becky has a better appreciation for what life was like for her father. His job is exhausting and his official duties don't end at school events where he'd like to be a doting grandfather.

Seeing his parents at work made Trice more empathetic toward them, although at times he resented the time they gave other children. "I saw my parents as givers," Trice says. "I have a giving attitude now, and a lot of that probably stems from being the child of educators."

Trice's parents were always interested in talking to his teachers. That could be touchy, but Trice thinks he knows how the teachers felt dealing with the child of the principal or superintendent. "It was a lot of pressure for the teacher," he says. "It was like getting a report card every day."

Uncomfortable Position

That cuts both ways, though. Superintendents with children in their own districts suffer intense scrutiny, too, they say. If their children feel they're being parented by everyone in the district, then the superintendent often feels his or her parenting skills are on display for all to critique.

It can be difficult for parents who are school system leaders to have meaningful conversations about their child's academic progress. Rose Marie Boniface never felt she could honestly convince teachers she wasn't speaking to them as their boss when she discussed her daughters' schoolwork. Ted Blaesing eventually ceded his three daughters' parent-teacher conferences to his wife, Loretta, because he worried that he intimidated teachers.

Charles Brazeale, who heads the 300-student Golden City School District in southwest Missouri, knew when he became superintendent that some teachers would worry he would micromanage his children's education.

"One teacher felt nervous about dealing with my kids because I'm the superintendent," says Brazeale, 36. "She was a little afraid to say it the way she meant it because of who I was."

Of course, a superintendent's celebrity is certain among teachers. But whether many students recognize a peer as the son or daughter of the school district's chief executive depends on a school district's size.

For the Blaesing daughters, it was a toss-up whether they were pegged by classmates as the superintendent's child. But for superintendents' children in much smaller districts, it's a given.

Sometimes it troubles Eden Gayer. The 13-year-old is a 6th grader in the 300-student Montmorency School District, a K-8 district in Rock Falls, Ill., where her father, Brett Gayer, 38, is the superintendent and principal.

As a student in the same building where her father works, Eden spent the first two weeks of school walking around the upper-grade building, which houses her classes and her father's office, without a name. "I was just the principal's kid," she says.

Other students often complain about her father to her, she says. Eden does her best to ignore their comments, but admits "it's kind of hard to sit there and listen to them talk about my dad."

Brazeale's children hear harsh comments, too. In Golden City, Mo., where he's been superintendent for just two years, students in kindergarten through 12th grade are housed in a single building so there's no escaping the unkind remarks for his son, Dak Keeling, 17. But Dak has devised a way to handle it. He surrounds himself with friends who don't care who his dad is and disregards the others.

The catty comments don't bother Brazeale's 16-year-old daughter Olivia Keeling as much as the size of the school itself, she says. "Everybody finds out everything so you can't get away with anything."

But Brazeale's youngest child, Hunter Keeling, 13, minces no words describing his dislike of the situation. A self-described prankster, Hunter doesn't think his clowning around would get him in as much trouble if Brazeale weren't omnipresent at school.

Annoyed Children

That's a common complaint among superintendents' children. Their antics are more swiftly and severely punished because they become an example for other students. That can be especially true in smaller districts, where rumors and truth travel at lightning speed.

Yet that was something that kept Ed and Rosie Rastovski, both educators, seeking out mid-sized school districts in eastern Nebraska and western Iowa where they raised their two children. They wanted districts that offered enough opportunities but that weren't so big their kids could be anonymous.

That approach to career advancement annoyed their daughter, Sierra Killpack, now 25 and living in Dallas. She graduated from the Tri-Center School District in Neola, Iowa, an 820student district where her father was superintendent. Her graduating class had 60 students, which constitutes a middle-sized high school in that part of Iowa, Rastovski says.

But Killpack detested the notoriety that came with her father's job. "Sierra didn't like that everyone knew what she was doing," said Rastovski, now superintendent of the 870-student Wahoo School District, east of Omaha, Neb.

"Basically, it was just like having your parents there all the time, and you could never do anything wrong," Killpack recalls.

The Rastovskis liked it that way. They wanted to know what was going in the lives of Killpack and Aaron Rastovski, their 19-year-old son who's now a freshman at Doane College in Crete, Neb.

Ed Rastovski says he passed up opportunities to move to larger districts because he wanted his children to experience the same small-town life he had, growing up as one of just 17 members of his graduating class in North Dakota. Besides, he says, "I enjoyed seeing my son and daughter in the hall." And he liked knowing what was going on with his children.

Career Influence

When Killpack, the more rebellious of his two children, pushed the boundaries, her parents knew it immediately and stepped up to rein her in. As a result, Killpack vowed many times never to pursue a career in education. Yet she's eating a little crow today, having finished her bachelor's degree in interdisciplinary studies in August at the University of Texas, Arlington. She now teaches pre-kindergarten in the 62,000-student Arlington School District in the Dallas suburbs.

She thought teaching wasn't for her, having observed the long hours at school put in by her father and her mother, a middle-school language arts teacher in Elkhorn, Neb. Their family life pretty much revolved around school, Rosie Rastovski says. Killpack told herself that wasn't the course for her.

But she thought about the benefits of a career in education, such as spending more time with one's children. Then last year, after changing majors again and again over the course of her college career, she became a teaching assistant. Something clicked.

"I loved it," Killpack says. "The kids were great. I think it's just in my blood."

RELATED ARTICLE: Easing your child's burden through talk.

Whether they think about it before or after they take the position, most superintendents soon realize the job can affect their children.

It can be painful to watch, as Brett Gayer found out.

As superintendent and principal of the Montmorency School District, a K8 district with 300 students in northwestern Illinois, Gayer handed down detention for a boy who had violated a school rule. The next day, as two of Gayer's children--a kindergartener and a 4th grader--sat in their school bus seat, another bus pulled parallel. Through the windows, the Gayer children saw the boy who had received detention. He mouthed, "I hate your dad."

Gayer was furious but not really surprised. It comes with the territory when you're the boss, he says. And he's talked with his four children, who range from kindergarten to 6th grade, about dealing with unkind and hateful remarks.

"You have to talk about things," Gayer says. "If the communication is not good before something happens, it's not going to be good after something happens."

Extra Criticism

The key to easing life for the children of superintendents or any other public figure is for parents to talk about potentially hurtful situations before they occur, authorities say. Parents must acknowledge that in some ways, their children could have a tougher go of it than others--reaping extra criticism for doing poorly in school, never receiving full credit for an accomplishment without an intimation of parental influence and undue teasing whenever the superintendent makes an unpopular decision.

Keeping the parent-child relationship at the forefront of any discussion is important, says Charles Figley, a psychologist who has studied the children of celebrities. Sooner or later, children grow up and leave home. The parent might change careers. But the family unit will always be there.

Figley recommends parents and their children develop a crisis management plan. That way, if the children hear negative things about the parent, they will feel comfortable approaching him or her themselves rather than relying on rumors to fuel their understanding of the situation. And if things really get hot, Figley says, parents should have a plan for removing their children from the scene for a while by taking a vacation, for example.

"The parent always has to do whatever he or she can to protect their child," says Figley, founder and director of the Florida State University Traumatology Institute.

Unrealistic Expectations

Often children of public figures come to believe their job is to stay out of the limelight, and they adopt unhealthy behaviors to accomplish that, according to Tim Sanford, a licensed professional counselor in Colorado Springs, Colo., who works with children of ministers. Children find it difficult to trust people and set up unrealistic expectations of themselves that invariably lead to failure.

Having another adult at school who recognizes the difficulty of being the superintendent's child is invaluable, said Becky Blaesing, the oldest daughter of Ted Blaesing, superintendent in White Bear Lake, Minn. In her case, that person was a junior high principal, who modeled to the teaching staff how best to interact with the superintendent's child.

For Sarah and Leah Boniface, their champion came in the form of a guidance counselor who herself was the daughter of a superintendent.

Their mother, Rose Marie Boniface, superintendent of the Marlborough, Mass., School District, discussed again and again with her daughters the isolation they were experiencing because of her job. She also talked about her daughter's feelings whenever she could with their teachers and other staff members.

Boniface sometimes would gently persuade the girls that some slights and embarrassments had to be overlooked.

"I would ask, 'Is it something you should just let go?'" Boniface says. "They had to be willing to."

--Kate Beem

RELATED ARTICLE: A cruel world: a superintendent's daughter's account.

BY LISA BUIE

I always was picked dead last for kickball.

Sure, I was a lousy athlete, but so were a lot of classmates who still got chosen before me. My liability was far worse than being slow or clumsy.

I was the school superintendent's daughter.

If ever a group needed a formal support network, this is it.

Growing up is hard enough. For a superintendent's offspring, life can bring a degree of cruelty that only members born into this club can truly understand.

When I was 10, my father's job took us to Spartanburg County School District 3, a rural area tucked among the red clay hills of South Carolina. Composed mainly of crumbling, defunct textile mills, its principal communities were towns named Pacolet and Cowpens.

My mother was underwhelmed.

"You're making us move here?" the former French teacher said during her first tour. But it was the era of the submissive wife. Where men went, women followed, even if grudgingly. She pledged to make the best of it and figured life would get better once she made friends.

It was a disaster.

Isolated Life

In an area awash in natives and their cousins, we were the outsiders from out of state. In a place where religion usually meant Southern Baptist, we were United Methodist.

White kids used the "n" word with impunity. In the North Carolina school district I came from, that was considered a swear word.

Making things worse was the fact that I liked to study. My father was one of the few people around with a doctorate. My mother, an accomplished dancer, reveled in the arts.

That background isolated us from many of my peers, most of whose parents stopped short of college and who had no plans to attend themselves.

It made us outcasts.

So much so that when my father had to make critical decisions, whether it was enacting a teachers' dress code or deciding that a few snow flurries weren't enough to cancel school, my sisters and brother and I learned just what being the superintendent's children really meant.

It meant learning not to mind sitting alone at a lunch table. It meant having classmates abruptly toss books onto the nearest empty bus seat while we stood up front for what seemed an eternity, humiliated and wondering whether we'd ever find a place to sit.

It meant never running for student government more than once because people vandalized our campaign posters.

It meant hearing people say that the things that we did achieve (which had to be outside the control of any student body vote) were due to our father's job. It meant never getting in the slightest bit of trouble--not because school staffers showed us favoritism, but because we knew that embarrassing Dad at work carried a high price.

Cruel Acts

Being the superintendent's child meant fighting tears when others flung profanities as we hurried to class or tried to eat at McDonald's.

For me, it meant having one high school classmate with the guts to ask me out suddenly start avoiding me when the ridicule became too much. It meant skipping senior prom and vowing to do the same someday for class reunions.

At home, it meant hearing the screaming voice on the other end of a phone threatening to "get" our father.

It meant waking up to exploded mailboxes and rutted front lawns. It meant having the huge plastic bull stolen from atop the Bi-Lo grocery store and placed in front of our house. It meant being too afraid to pray at the church altar; that would start rumors about what was "wrong" in our family. It meant feeling uncomfortable confiding in a teacher or counselor when we thought our parents didn't understand. After all, guess who their boss was?

It also meant getting to know the name of the state police officer who guarded us from the picketers outside our house when our father fired a popular band director and couldn't by law explain his reasons publicly. All the while, local television hacks circled like vultures, waiting to write his career obituary.

Relief at Last

As an oldest child, my pain multiplied as I helplessly watched the pattern of persecution repeated with my siblings. I wished I could do something, anything, to spare them.

No one in my family ever talked much about these things. My father, who spent 15 years in that superintendency, was away most of the time at school board meetings. It was the Deep South, still the era in which a man's success was measured by his breadwinning prowess. Any complaints would have been perceived as whiny and ungrateful.

I shed no tears as I took my high school diploma. I thought only of college and how I would no longer be forced to wear a label that all these years had felt like a giant "kick me" sign.

Today, I call college the high school I never had. Nearly everyone was from a different place. Classmates, at least most of them, wanted to learn. The dean's list was not the nerd's list. I edited the student newspaper. I knew what it was like to wear a sorority pin, to dress up for a formal. The man of my dreams was not ashamed to ask me out and, later, to be his wife.

For the first time in my life, I was not known and judged for being the superintendent's daughter.

I was just me.

And kickball didn't matter anymore.

Lisa Buie is a bureau editor for the St. Petersburg Times, 24038 State Road 54, Lutz, FL 33559. E-mail: [e-mail]. Her father, James A. Buie, retired after 38 years in public education, including 20 years as a superintendent.

RELATED ARTICLE: The paradoxical journey of a superintendent's family.

BY STEVE P. SINGLETON

The itinerant nature of the superintendency carries definite implications for the children and spouses of superintendents. During my 30-year career in education, each move has actually been a blessing for our family, though it may not have seemed so at the time.

One move during a particularly difficult professional time contributed literally to the growth of our family. As I look back at my family's passage, I've picked up a few lessons that have served me in my leadership.

The journey began in 1980 in Mountain Home, Ark., located in the north-central part of the state on the border with Missouri. As a young junior high principal, I inherited a sex education program that blew up in controversy during my first year, becoming one of the leading news stories of the year in the local press. The community was deeply divided over what content was appropriate in teaching students about sexuality.

After the election of three new school board members whom I campaigned against because of their differing views, I knew it was time to move on. (Lesson 1: Know when it is time to leave.)

I was hired as an assistant superintendent in Marion, Ark., about five miles west of Memphis, Tenn. The first question posed during my job interview was, "Have you ever been involved in a controversy?" I asked if sex education rang a bell for the interviewers. We shared a hearty laugh because they had a similar controversy. (Lesson 2: Most administrators deal with the same problems so don't think yours are unique.)

During the first year in my new job, we received a phone call from a physician in Mountain Home. He had been a former school board president who was instrumental in helping start the sex education program. He wondered if my wife and I, married for 11 years without children, would be interested in adopting a baby that was to be born later that year. The doctor explained the need to place the baby out of the area.

Four months later, we received the call letting us know of the birth of our son. We picked Paul up when he was only 17 hours old. He was perfect!

Celebrating a Birth

Now consider the paradox: A family is born through the most ironic of circumstances. A young couple leaves a town because of controversy over a sex education program and then receives their greatest gift--a child--from that same town. Had we not left a place we both loved, we would not be the family we became. (Lesson 3: Some doors don't open unless other doors are closed. Alternatively, when you're in a valley, there is a mountaintop somewhere near.)

The people of Marion surrounded us with love and encouragement. They celebrated with us in the birth of our son. At the community's yearly Thanksgiving service sponsored by the local churches, we were asked to say a few words since everyone knew how thankful we were. My wife told me, "You can do it."

At the service, I quoted from Isaiah, "Ye shall be comforted in Jerusalem." I held up my 4-month-old son and thanked the community for being our Jerusalem. With all of these events changing our life, an amazing thing happened. We forgot all about the controversy and hard feelings of the past. Marion was truly our Jerusalem. (Lesson 4: Get over it and move on! Each day is precious; don't waste it.)

Home Again

After 10 years in Marion, the last five as superintendent, I decided to look for new challenges. In yet another twist of irony, the superintendency opened in Mountain Home, the place I had left a decade earlier in frustration and disappointment. I always had wondered if I could have handled the superintendent's job if the sex education controversy had not occurred.

Before applying, I called my physician friend, the former board president, to ensure this would not be a problem for Paul, who was now 9. He assured me it would not. During the interview process, the board asked, "Have you ever been involved in any controversy?" I reminded them (an entirely new seven-member board) how the sex education program became the second leading news story of the year behind a double homicide.

I also was asked about the former board members who had been on the opposite side of the issue from me. I said I had long ago let go of any hard feelings. I also shared with the board how this circumstance had in fact provided our greatest gift.

At the reception to welcome my family back to Mountain Home, I was pleased to see one of these former board members. We shook hands and after a brief exchange shared a hug. I have always appreciated this person's courage to make such a generous gesture, (Lesson 5: Forgiveness frees everyone who gives it and accepts it.)

I'm now midway through my 10th year as superintendent in Mountain Home. That makes my tenure the second longest in the district's past 50 years. My son will graduate this year from the place where he started life. And as I look back over our journey, it is easy to see how the opportunities for renewal and redemption are in front of us each day. All we need to do is embrace them.

Steve Singleton is superintendent of the Mountain Home Public Schools, 1230 South Maple, Mountain Home, AR 72653. E-mail: [e-mail]

RELATED ARTICLE: Elusive solution: living outside your district.

The simplest way for superintendents to shield their children from the pitfalls of the job is to live outside the district where they work. But that's easier said than done in some cases.

Superintendents are viewed as vital community boosters, so school district patrons often expect them to embrace every aspect of their school districts--from living there to shopping and paying taxes there.

Indeed, the school boards of many major cities require superintendents to live within the city borders or within a close proximity of their districts, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. In Dayton, Ohio, the board requires all administrators at or above the level of an assistant principal to reside within the boundaries of the school district.

The trend, however, seems to be toward relaxing residency requirements. A survey of school superintendents in New York, conducted by the New York State Council of School Superintendents, found that about a third of upstate superintendents and two-thirds of those on Long Island do not live within their school districts. And only 13 percent of New York superintendents with school-aged children live in the district where they work.

The National School Boards Association takes no stance and contends the issue hasn't been a particularly visible one among the group's members, says Karla Schultz, an NSBA policy analyst. "Boards are going to adapt that to whatever their local circumstances are," she said.

In 1999, Michigan passed legislation that eased residency requirements. The law prohibited school boards from mandating that superintendents live within the district where they're employed, although boards may stipulate that superintendents live within a 20-mile range of the district.

The Michigan School Boards Association opposed this change, which came about because of pressure from other public employee groups. The association considered it a matter of local control, says Brad Banasik, the MSBA general counsel. "That's not to say most districts want their superintendents to live in the district, but they do want them to be a part of the community," he adds.

Constant Grumblings

But feeling a part of a place isn't necessarily incumbent upon living there, says Jim Rosborg, superintendent of the 3,700-student Belleville School District in the St. Louis suburb of Belleville, Ill.

Until his oldest child was approaching high school, Rosborg, his wife and three children lived within the Belleville School District. But as his children grew older, Rosborg got a glimpse of the hardships they might endure because their father was a highly visible district administrator. His older son made the junior high basketball team amid constant grumblings that he was playing only because Rosborg had coached in the district previously.

At that point, after 13 years teaching in the district, Rosborg was an assistant superintendent. He didn't want to leave his job, but he also didn't want his children to suffer. "I pretty much decided that I didn't want the kids to have to go through that," he says.

So with his school board's blessing, Rosborg moved to the neighboring Freeburg district, buying property within 11 minutes' driving distance of his office. He relishes the freedom of living outside his district but remains deeply involved in the Belleville community, serving on various committees and the Chamber of Commerce board, he says.

"I spend most of my life in the district," says Rosborg, 54, whose three children now are in their 20s. "I just don't happen to sleep in the district."

A Happier Son

The importance of maintaining involvement in the district that employs you can't be underscored enough, agreed Ralph Marshall, 53, superintendent of the 1,800-student Hononegah Community High School District in Rockton, Ill., north of Chicago.

Marshall and his wife decided four years ago to move back to a district where they'd lived previously to shelter their youngest child from the fallout from tough teacher contract negotiations, which eventually led to a strike. Although he couldn't prove anything, Marshall was sure that some teachers were taking out their frustrations on his son. So with his school board's approval, Marshall moved his family two hours south to the 825-student Leroy School District near Bloomington, Ill. But Marshall stayed behind, commuting mostly on weekends to see his family.

He spends much of his time in the Hononegah district, he says, to remain effective. He's active in the local chamber and the Rotary club. It's a hardship on him personally: Visiting his family means spending hours in the car, listening to books on tape. But it's a trade-off he's willing to accept for the sake of his child's happiness, Marshall says.

--Kate Beem

Kate Beem is a free-lance education writer in Independence, Mo. E-mail: [e-mail]