About 15 years ago, the University of Southern Maine offered a program to put aspiring superintendents on a fast track to get certified for the position. About two dozen educators took the course and the majority got superintendent jobs soon after.

When the college decided to offer the program again a couple of years ago, there weren’t enough students to justify holding it.

“We couldn’t come up with more than five,” Jody Capelluti, a professor of educational leadership at USM, said about the number of educators interested in becoming superintendents.

Pressure to improve test scores, constant communication on smartphones and heightened public criticism through social media are among the reasons many school administrators are opting to forgo the six-figure salaries that go with the top job in the district to stay in less stressful positions.

At the same time, higher turnover in the position – whether because of burnout, local politics or clashes with the community – has put school boards on the hunt for new superintendents more often.

“I think it’s a crisis situation,” Capelluti said.

In the past year, at least seven school districts in southern Maine have had superintendent openings and some have found just how hard it is to fill the job. School districts have conducted multiple searches, and sometimes have competed for the same candidates.

After having its two finalists withdraw from consideration, Cape Elizabeth will start its search anew this winter, when it will likely compete for candidates with Westbrook and Bonny Eagle, who lost their superintendents this spring – one to a smaller district with a higher salary, and the other after a scandal over hiring his son.

Being in a crowded field of prospective employers is nothing new to Cape, which lost its superintendent when Meredith Nadeau took a job in the Newmarket, New Hampshire, school district.

In its initial search, Cape shared a finalist with neighboring Scarborough, whose superintendent is retiring this summer. That finalist ended up going elsewhere, and Scarborough eventually hired a candidate who was the runner-up to Nadeau in New Hampshire.

Cape now has an interim superintendent to provide more time for its search.

Although superintendents’ reasons for leaving their jobs vary, districts are facing common challenges.

Superintendents don’t stay in one job as long as they used to and their jobs are harder to fill.

In southern Maine, Portland probably knows best how high turnover can affect a school district.

With seven superintendents in less than 10 years – the most recent hired last month – the state’s largest school system seems to be searching for a superintendent more often than it’s not. That instability can stymie a district’s ability to effect positive change, said Susan Pratt, president of the Maine School Superintendents Association and superintendent of School Administrative District 58 in Phillips.

“It takes awhile to gear up when you move to a system,” she said. “That consistency in leadership is critical to be able to move the system forward.”

A commitment to stay in the job – and not just use the position to forward their career – was stressed in interviews with candidates for the Portland superintendency, said Debra Hill, managing partner of BWP and Associates, the Illinois-based firm hired to conduct the search.

She said their tenure in past positions was scrutinized and the candidates were asked point-blank about their intentions.

And Portland’s school board made no secret of the fact that the city’s new superintendent, Xavier Botana, expressed a commitment to stay “for the long haul.”

Five to seven years is considered the typical tenure for a superintendent in one district, Hill said.

In Maine, the average is less than five years, said Connie Brown, executive director of the Maine School Management Association, which leads the vast majority of superintendent searches in the state, including 10 this year.

A 2015 study by the American Association of School Administrators found that the most common reason for superintendents leaving their jobs was for a new challenge in a different type of district, followed by better pay, then conflict with school board members.

When asked what they’d like to be doing in five years, 30 percent said they hoped to be retired.

The aging of baby boomers is one reason more superintendent jobs are opening up, Hill said.

Another, like in most industries, is that people simply tend to move around more, both geographically and between companies.

“The old model, the superintendent that came up through the district and stayed for 25 years, is unusual,” Brown said.

Turnover on school boards can also lead superintendents to jump ship – when the people they’re working for are completely different from the ones who hired them, especially if new board members have a specific agenda.

Capelluti said it’s becoming less common for people to run for the office simply to serve their community.

“Many people run to get something or get rid of something,” he said.

The superintendent’s relationship with the board and the community can make or break his or her job, in Hill’s opinion.

And with social media giving a platform to spread criticism – often anonymously – those relationships can sour quickly.

“People tend to read what’s on the surface without understanding the rationale or underlying reasons,” Hill said about the effect of social media, leading people to pass judgment based on incomplete or inaccurate information.

Pratt agreed.

“There’s more of being in the limelight, more accountability to the public,” she said. “Everything is out there and upfront and things hit the airway before the dust settles at the local level. It’s just the way society has changed.”

Technology has also made superintendents more accessible. Email, text message and Facebook allow members of the school board and the community to get in touch on any day at any time, often expecting an immediate response.

“It has become a job that really is 24-7,” Brown said. “It’s very difficult to manage the expectation that you must always be available to people.”

All that is happening at the same time that more is asked of superintendents, who used to be more like business managers and are now expected to be experts on curriculum and to improve student test scores, along with managing finances while receiving fewer resources, Hill said.

Pratt has heard from other superintendents and felt firsthand how the job has gotten “bigger and bigger” with more responsibilities than ever before.

“The value of our job is huge and yet we don’t always feel like we’ve gotten that respect that we have in the past,” she said.

Capelluti said he thinks things started to change about 20 years ago when districts started cutting assistant superintendents, a position that was once in nearly every Maine school system and now exists only in the largest ones.

That’s left superintendents with less opportunity to train for the job and less support when they’re in it.

As a result, more people are staying at the principal level or taking other jobs in the central office with no further aspirations, and it’s creating a problem.

Clearly the salary doesn’t seem worth it, although districts may have started to offer more money to the right candidate. Brown estimated that the average salary of superintendents in Cumberland County is around $125,000. However, recent hires have been offered between $128,000 – the new salary of Becky Foley in Freeport-based Regional School Unit 5 – and $148,000 – the new salary of Botana in Portland.

Capelluti believes the solution is to make school boards understand their boundaries, both in terms of time and responsibilities, and to give superintendents adequate support and compensation for a job that, in many Maine towns, is essentially the chief executive officer of its largest employer.

“We desperately need more superintendents, but the job has to be more attractive,” he said.