21CSLA (21st Century California School Leadership Academy)

Throughout the pandemic, school communities have faced the tremendous tasks of navigating the unprecedented challenges of remote learning, returning to in-person learning, and attending to the spillover effects of the pandemic, all while supporting the needs of the school community. The demands accompanying these tasks especially impacted school principals, as their roles and responsibilities continuously expanded to attend to crisis-related needs (Clifford & Coggshall, 2021). School principals were positioned with bearing additional duties such as navigating public health mandates and implementing pandemic-related policies, which exacerbated their already high levels of job-related stress. As the impact of the pandemic continues, it is likely that long-term demands will exceed the personal strengths and professional resources of school principals, increasing their vulnerability to burnout and turnover (Kniffin et al., 2021). It is critical to understand how principals experience school-related stressors, delineate the factors that protect principals from burnout, and examine which groups of principals are most vulnerable to burnout to minimize the increasingly high levels of turnover, burnout, and work-related stress experienced by school principals. To address this practice and research need, the 21CSLA research team launched the Principal Resilience Study, a longitudinal survey study designed to identify significant school-related stressors and psychological factors that protect school principals from burnout, specifically in the COVID-19 context. Open to all K-12 school principals in California, our team collected a total of 690 responses across the three waves. In this brief, we present data across all three waves of our study to draw comparisons between the different phases of the pandemic.