Students Need Women In Top Jobs

Walking into the Medical Lake High School gym for an awards convocation takes energy for adults. The 600-plus students are buzzing. But when Susan Fahrni asks the students to listen up, they do. She’s the principal, after all.

The students probably don’t know that their principal is a rarity in Spokane County.

But she is. Fahrni is the only public high school woman principal in the county. Medical Lake students are learning, at a key age, that women can run complex things such as high schools. They can hire and fire people, supervise men, lead a team.

Education reporter Jeanette White’s stories, which ran Sunday and Monday in The Spokesman-Review, uncovered some statistics that might surprise you.

Though most teachers in the Inland Northwest are women, most of those in high-responsibility and top-paying posts - principals, administrators and varsity coaches - are men.

The reasons are many.

Some of it is tradition. Men have always been the high school principals and coached the varsity teams and that’s an entrenched pattern difficult to reverse.

Some is due to the lack of mentors for women aspiring to the highest positions. Some of it is reluctance on the part of women to give up the dream schedules of classroom teachers. And reluctance to juggle the nurturing of their own children at home while leading hundreds of other children at school.

Alison Olzendam, principal at Chase Middle School, supervises 940 kids and has a family of her own. She admits her life takes phenomenal energy and a love of decision-making. But it’s worth it.

Why does it matter that so few women are in these top positions? It matters because women principals and women coaches provide strong role models for today’s young women. It matters because today’s young men will have many women bosses in their careers. It matters because the skills that women can bring to leadership roles - collaboration and team-building - will be in great demand in the 21st century.

The solution to this gender imbalance will take collaboration. Districts throughout the Inland Northwest should take a hard look at the status of women in leadership positions and then ask what they are doing to identify, mentor and promote women.

And women with leadership skills must be willing to step out of the comfort of the classroom. They must seek out mentors, female and male, and then make their way into the coaching jobs, the principal’s offices and into the future of our children.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = Rebecca Nappi/For the editorial board