By Dr. Erlange Elisme, DSW
I have spent more than thirty years inside public education as a school social worker, first in Broward County and then with Gwinnett County Public Schools, where I also served as a Foster Care Liaison. Across those years, and in my work as a behavioral health consultant supporting healthcare and human-service organizations, I have sat with the leaders who hold the weight of these systems. I have watched what the work asks of them when no one is watching. What I have seen up close, the research is now naming clearly. School leader burnout is now one of the most documented and least addressed pressures in public education and behavioral health systems.
What the Research Says About School Leader Burnout
A nationally representative 2022 RAND Corporation study of school principals found that 85 percent of principals were experiencing frequent job-related stress and 48 percent reported burnout, compared with much lower rates among working adults overall. A four-year longitudinal study by Beausaert and colleagues (2016), which followed approximately 26 percent of Australia’s school principals (N = 3,572) across four annual waves, found that stress reliably predicts burnout over time, and that the lack of meaningful social support is one of the strongest contributors.
A 2024 qualitative study published in the European Journal of Education added a sobering finding: although the short-term plans of principals experiencing burnout are to continue their duties in their schools, in the long term, they plan to leave the profession and completely move away from educational work. They are not threatening to leave. They are quietly preparing to.
We talk often about teacher retention. We talk less about school leader burnout, and what happens to a building when those leaders run out of capacity to keep leading.
Where the Conversation Usually Starts, and Where It Stops Short
When a school is unraveling, we usually look at the teachers. We notice the ones leaving mid-day, the ones crying in staff meetings, the ones turning in resignation letters. The conversation moves quickly to teacher retention, teacher wellness, teacher burnout. Those conversations matter, and they are also incomplete.
If we want to understand why so many schools feel like they are running out of air, we have to look up. We have to look at the principal who arrives before the buses and stays after the cleaning crew. The assistant principal who fields a parent call, an Individualized Education Program (IEP) question, a staff conflict, and a bus referral inside the same fifteen minutes. The instructional leader who is told to coach teachers and also to absorb their distress. Leaders set the tone of the building. When they are running on empty, the building runs on empty too.
The Role Itself Has Become a Containment Vessel
The reasons are not mysterious. A peer-reviewed study on emotional labor in school leadership found that many school administrators, who are tasked with managing the negative emotions of parents and teachers, report that the profession leads to constant and prolonged stress, resulting in emotional exhaustion and burnout. The role itself has become a containment vessel. As DeMatthews, Carrola, Reyes, and Knight (2021) note in their analysis of school leadership burnout, principals carry the emotional burdens of their staff and students alongside the operational demands of running a school, and these compounding pressures are not adequately addressed at the district level.
A growing body of research now uses what scholars call the affective paradigm to understand school leadership, recognizing that emotion is not a distraction from the work of leading. It is part of the work itself. Chen, Berkovich, and Eyal (2021), in their editorial introducing a special issue on school leaders’ emotional experiences, observe that principals are increasingly required to act as emotional leaders, juggling stakeholder needs, competing objectives, and the emotions of teachers, all of which place significant pressure on their psychosocial and physiological health.
This is the word the research keeps returning to. Principals absorb. They absorb what students bring in from home, what teachers bring in from their classrooms, and what families bring in from their lives, all while meeting test score targets and answering to the district by the end of the day.
The Cultural and Political Weight Leaders Are Also Carrying
The pressure does not stop at the schoolhouse door. School leaders are also navigating a cultural and political climate that keeps shifting under their feet. Emerging research is now naming this directly. A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in Frontiers in Public Health found that school principals face increasing professional challenges and psychological strain, amplified by extra-organizational stressors such as political and systemic changes, climate change, war, and economic instability. These factors elevate job demands and increase the risk of professional burnout.
In RAND’s 2025 State of the Superintendent survey, the intrusion of political issues and opinions was named as a stressor for 61 percent of superintendents, and school board relations and pressure was a stressor for 30 percent, up four points from the previous year.
The rules are also changing in real time. Federal funding for schools is in a season of public uncertainty. State legislation around what can and cannot be taught, and around how schools must respond to immigration enforcement, is shifting from one session to the next. Communities of color, immigrant families, faith communities, and LGBTQ+ students are all at the center of debates that play out daily in the buildings principals are responsible for. Leaders are asked to hold steadiness for their staff and families while the ground beneath them keeps moving.
For school leaders serving Black, Brown, immigrant, and bilingual communities, this weight lands harder. They are often the ones absorbing the fear of families who are watching their legal status, their children’s safety, and their access to services become political talking points. They are translating policy whiplash into reassurance for staff who are already stretched thin. They are doing all of this without a script, because the script keeps being rewritten.
This is not a separate problem from burnout. It is one of the largest forces driving it.
What School Leader Burnout Looks Like in the Body
A single hour in a leader’s day.This is what it looks like in the body. Picture a single hour in a leader’s day. A parent walks in distressed about a discipline decision. A teacher quietly closes the office door behind her in tears. The district sends an urgent email asking for a data report by end of day. A student is sent down for behavior that staff cannot manage. The leader has not eaten lunch. She has not used the restroom in four hours. Her phone is buzzing.
This is what the body of a leader looks like when it has been holding too much for too long. Decisions slow down or get sharper than the leader intended. The open-door policy quietly closes. Coaching conversations turn into compliance conversations. The leader who used to walk the halls greeting students by name now walks straight to her office. None of this is character. It is nervous system load. The body that is bracing cannot also coach, mentor, or imagine. When leadership capacity erodes, decision quality, staff trust, and student outcomes follow.
Why Student-Centered Trauma Work Is Not Enough
When we talk about trauma-responsive schools, the conversation usually begins and ends with students. That framing is important, and it is incomplete in the same way that the teacher conversation is incomplete. A leader who has not been resourced to regulate her own stress cannot reliably create the conditions for anyone else’s regulation. A school cannot coach its way past what its leader is carrying.
This is where trauma-responsive support has to start. Not as a wellness day. Not as a meditation app added to the benefits portal. Not as a single keynote at August preplanning. As a sustained, structured commitment to the leader’s capacity to keep leading.
If we are serious about retention, we have to intervene where capacity is breaking. That begins with leadership.
Three Commitments That Address School Leader Burnout
Make leader regulation a system priority, not a personal one. In practice: protected time on the calendar for leader reflection, not optional and not after hours. Districts often treat principal well-being as something each leader should manage privately, on her own time. That framing guarantees burnout. The Beausaert et al. (2016) longitudinal study makes a specific recommendation worth taking seriously: unbundling or repackaging the responsibilities of the principalship so that leadership is shared across an administrative team, rather than carried by one person. When the role itself is structured around emotional labor, the support for that labor has to be built into the role.
Name what leaders are actually carrying, in language that does not pathologize them. In practice: standing peer consultation groups that are not evaluative. Burnout is not weakness. Burnout in school leaders is a predictable nervous system response to a sustained mismatch between demand and resource. Leaders need a vocabulary that tells the truth about what their bodies are doing without making them feel diagnosed.
The I.C.E.B.E.R.G.™ Method, developed by Elisme Consulting Services, was built for this. It teaches leaders and teams to look beneath observable behavior, including their own, and recognize the whole story underneath. That might mean naming the survival response showing up under a staff member’s shutdown in a Monday meeting, rather than reading it as disengagement. A principal who can name what is happening inside her can lead from a steadier place than one who is trying to override it.
Distribute the load so the system survives. In practice: formal redistribution of emotionally heavy tasks across an administrative team, not informal handoffs. The H.O.L.D.™ Framework, also developed by Elisme Consulting Services, addresses how institutions carry stress, trauma, and responsibility over time. The stages are simple to name and harder to live: hear what is beneath the surface, organize for stability under pressure, lead through weight without losing people, and distribute the load so the system survives.
This might look like reworking how crisis calls are routed, so the principal is not the default responder to every emotional emergency in the building. Most schools do the first part of leadership well. They hear the noise and organize the response. Where they fall apart is in the last two stages, where leaders are asked to carry weight no human nervous system can carry alone, and where the load is not distributed across roles, teams, or partnerships.
Where the Weight Begins
The teachers we are losing did not leave because the work got harder overnight. They left because the leaders above them ran out of capacity to hold the building, and the leaders ran out of capacity because no one was holding them.
We can keep treating school leader burnout as a teacher problem. Or we can be honest about where the weight begins, and start there, before your leaders quietly step away from the role.
If you are a superintendent, board member, healthcare executive, or funder, this is where your first investment belongs.
Elisme Consulting Services partners with school districts, leadership teams, and education systems to build trauma-responsive cultures from the top down. To explore consulting, training, or executive support for your leaders, contact elisme@elismeconsultingservices.com.
References
Beausaert, S., Froehlich, D. E., Devos, C., & Riley, P. (2016). Effects of support on stress and burnout in school principals. Educational Research, 58(4), 347–365. https://doi.org/10.1080/00131881.2016.1220810
Chen, J., Berkovich, I., & Eyal, O. (2021). School leaders’ emotional experiences and capabilities: Perspectives, challenges, and prospects. The Asia-Pacific Education Researcher, 30(4), 311–313. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-021-00564-y
DeMatthews, D., Carrola, P., Reyes, P., & Knight, D. (2021). School leadership burnout and job-related stress: Recommendations for district administrators and principals. The Clearing House: A Journal of Educational Strategies, Issues and Ideas, 94(4), 159–167. https://doi.org/10.1080/00098655.2021.1894083
Doan, S., Steiner, E. D., & Pandey, R. (2025). State of the American superintendent: 2025 findings. RAND Corporation.
Karaevli, Ö. (2024). Understanding school principals’ burnout. European Journal of Education, 59(2), e12667. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12667
Kołodziejczyk, J., Mazurkiewicz, G., & Kołodziejczyk, J. (2025). Burnout of school principals in Poland: Work demands, resources, and stressors. Frontiers in Public Health, 13, 1610378. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpubh.2025.1610378
Steiner, E. D., Doan, S., Woo, A., Gittens, A. D., Lawrence, R. A., Berdie, L., Wolfe, R. L., Greer, L., & Schwartz, H. L. (2022). Restoring teacher and principal well-being is an essential step for rebuilding schools: Findings from the State of the American Teacher and State of the American Principal surveys. RAND Corporation. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA1108-4.html