‘Lonely’ For Female Principal

When Susan Fahrni stands in the hallway at Medical Lake High School, burly senior boys walk by and pat her head.

She’s their principal, not their pal. But she laughs it off.

Fahrni knows they’re on a learning curve. Until she became principal, students had never seen a woman run the school west of Spokane. In fact, she’s currently the only woman principal in all Spokane County’s public high schools.

“Sometimes they don’t know what to do with me,” she said.

Take the people who call for the principal, then assume they’ve been transferred to a secretary when she picks up the phone.

“People also ask, ‘What elementary school are you from?”’ Fahrni said. “I pretty much ignore them.”

Back when she was a head basketball coach, competing coaches inevitably approached her assistant, a man. “He spent most of his time saying, ‘No, she’s the head coach.”’

It’s no wonder Fahrni ranks her sense of humor among her top leadership skills. “In our society, we may say we think women and men are equal, but we are not,” she said.

The culprits aren’t just men. Fahrni, who’s 50, learned that early on, when she first interviewed for a principal job in Colorado.

It was a woman who asked Fahrni what made her think she - at 5-foot, 2-inches tall - could possibly control rowdy high school kids. “I don’t know if she thought I had to arm wrestle them,” Fahrni said.

She gives men buckets of credit for her success.

She and Medical Lake High’s athletic director have an interesting arrangement that helps them with a common struggle: balancing home and work responsibilities.

On nights when the school stays open for games or activities, they sneak away in shifts.

“He’ll run home and feed the cows, and I’ll stay,” Fahrni said. “He’ll come back and I’ll run home and walk my dog.”

When it comes to leadership, Principal Pete Lewis at Shaw Middle School in north Spokane taught her more than anyone, said Fahrni, who was an assistant there for two years.

Women role models have been tougher to find, simply because of their scarcity.

Even today, when Fahrni represents her school at meetings of the Great Northern Athletic League, she sits at a long conference table surrounded by 17 men.

“It’s been lonely.”

, DataTimes MEMO: See related story under headline: Principal of unfairness