It's a bit of a dance -- call it the superintendent shuffle.
School districts across the state have been in a race to fill openings for their top jobs in education.
Several districts have filled the positions; others are still looking.
And as NHPR correspondent Ellen Grimm reports, sometimes one district's gain is another district's loss.
It was early morning and a group of students at Manchester's Central High School had time off from classes for an assignment: interviewing a candidate for superintendent.
Sounds of students arriving: Jason, sign in and get one of those hello-my-name tags...
Junior Sarah Mercier is a drum majorette.
Mercier: How would you help funding to get those instruments, or to get new uniforms, or new risers for chorus, or new instruments for strings.
Manchester was one of several districts recently in a sometimes neck-and-neck search for a new superintendent.
Those jobs don’t stay filled for very long, compared with about 20 years ago.
Mark Joyce heads the New Hampshire School Administrators Association.
JOYCE: Those tenures were sometimes 10, 20 years or even more. Nowadays, the national statistic would say it's probably averaging around three years. However, in New Hampshire it seems to be a little better than that.
Part of the reason, says Joyce, is that the job has gotten more complex over the years.
Superintendents must deal with more laws and regulations and increased responsibilities that now include even students' medical needs.
Webb Scales is with the Hollis-Brookline school board, which hired a new superintendent last month.
SCALES: We were rushing because we were in competition for the candidates with the other schools in area. One of our finalists was also a finalist in Exeter, and we knew that Manchester was looking. They were a few weeks behind us.
Scales said the board's consultant had prepared them for about 20 applications.
That’s half the number they would have received 10 or 15 years ago.
SCALES : It's a lot of responsibility, and, of course, he's the guy who faces the public. He decides whether school gets cancelled when something goes wrong with the athletic program. He's the one who gets the call, so in some respects it's kind of a thankless job.
It’s also not cheap to find someone to head a school district
Hiring a consulting firm and paying for a marketing campaign, Scales says, can cost between 12 and 14 thousand dollars.
SCALES: It comes out of the SAU budget, which is only a million dollars and so, when you do the percentages, gosh that's a one percent budget increase right there all by itself in a year when we're only supposed to be going up by 1.8 percent.
This past weekend Manchester picked Thomas Brennan to head the state’s largest school district for a salary of $155,000.
The city wooed him away from his current job as Superintendent of the Kearsarge Regional School District.
But Katherine Labanaris with the Manchester School District says he has a big job ahead.
LABANARIS: He needs to address the morale issue in our district and he needs to show incredible leadership right from the outset, because that's been lacking in our district for several years now and we really need someone who can get right to it.
The Raymond school district was still hammering out the final contract details with its prospective new superintendent as of last week.
And the Mascenic District filled its open position in January, at a salary of $115,000. But the new superintendent will face a different job description next year.
School board member Gilbert Hargrove.
HARGROVE: The Mascenic part of our school district is Greenville, New Ipswich, and Mason. They were thinking about voting to split from our SAU. They actually did. They finalized the vote, and they're splitting from us.
Meanhwhile, there will be another opening at the Kearsarge Regional District in a few months -- when Thomas Brennan leaves for Manchester.
For NHPR News, I'm Ellen Grimm in Manchester.
