Why School Leaders Fall Apart in June

You made it to the end of another school year.

And somehow, you feel worse than you did in February.

The crash is what happens when a nervous system that has been running on adrenaline and obligation for ten months suddenly has nothing urgent left to hold onto. The urgency stops. You don’t.

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that school leaders carry into June. It doesn’t feel like the tired of a hard week. It doesn’t feel like anything you can explain at a dinner party or justify in a wellness check-in. It’s the feeling of coming down from a high state of performance and landing somewhere strange. Not rested, not relieved, not ready. Just… hollow.

Nobody warned me about this in my first year of leadership many years ago. It’s different from the teacher tired I was used to and it surprised me.

What You Just Survived

The exhaustion you’re feeling right now isn’t just from this spring. It’s accumulated.

Every open question that never fully resolved. Every expectation you interpreted because it wasn’t clearly communicated. Every time you picked up slack for a structure that didn’t exist. Every decision you made (and re-made) because the system didn’t hold it for you. Every “quick conversation” that added to the invisible pile you were already carrying.

Most conversations about leader burnout focus on the visible workload: the meetings, the evaluations, the parent emails, the IEP deadlines, the compliance windows stacking on top of everything else. That’s real. But in my research and in my own leadership experience, I’ve come to believe the more damaging load is the invisible one.

It’s the mental effort surrounding every task: the rereading, the interpreting, the checking, the second-guessing. It’s carrying unfinished work everywhere you go because the system never fully closes it. It’s compensating, quietly and constantly, for structures that should exist but don’t.

In Beyond Relationships, I write about what I call compensatory heroics: the way leaders (and teachers) absorb structural gaps through sheer relational effort and willpower. You hold it together because you care. You fill in the gaps because nobody else will. You become, effectively, the system itself.

And now the system is taking a summer off inside a person who doesn’t know how to stop carrying it.

This Isn’t a Resilience Problem

The most common response to leader exhaustion is to focus on the individual. Rest more. Set better limits. Prioritize self-care. Build resilience.

Those things matter, but they are not the whole answer. And if we’re being honest, focusing exclusively on individual resilience is a little bit like mopping the floor while the pipe is still leaking.

The pressures pushing school leaders toward exhaustion are not individual failures. They are design problems.

When expectations accumulate faster than systems evolve, people compensate. When urgency becomes the primary force shaping how work moves through a building, the system loses its ability to create the conditions where people can actually recover. You end up with a school that is technically functioning — test scores are holding, events are happening, teachers are showing up — but is actually being held together by individuals carrying unsustainable invisible workloads.

The exhaustion doesn’t always have a clear cause. It doesn’t come from one hard week or one bad initiative. It comes from a whole year of work that never fully closed.

That’s not a resilience problem. That’s a design problem.

What Summer Is Actually For

I used to think summer was about recovery. That’s still part of it, but I also now use summer for processing and refining.

The crash you feel at the end of the year is your system telling you something. Not about your capacity or your commitment, but about the design of the year you just survived. Where did the intensity never stop? What kept coming back that should have been resolved once and held by a structure? What did you carry that the calendar should have been carrying for you?

In Beyond Relationships, I spend a lot of time on rhythms as a design tool. There are three levels that matter:

Micro-rhythms regulate the work week. They answer recurring questions before people have to ask them. When micro-rhythms are absent, small uncertainties accumulate across every day. Work gets shaped by whatever feels most urgent that morning. Leaders spend enormous energy on navigation instead of improvement.

Meso-rhythms regulate improvement across quarters and semesters. They create planned moments to consolidate, integrate, and recalibrate before moving into the next phase. One of the most important, and most overlooked, is what I call a “nothing new period.” A deliberate pause where stabilization is the work.

Macro-rhythms shape the entire year. They create visibility around the larger arc with seasons of intensity, seasons of stabilization, and seasons of recovery, and they tie improvement work to the realistic capacity of the people inside the system.

Here’s the part most leaders skip: the school year already has rhythms whether you design them or not. Report card deadlines, state testing windows, enrollment pressures, and compliance visits all create recurring pressure points across the year. Schools that don’t design around these patterns don’t avoid the intensity. They just fail to protect space on the other side of it.

You already know when October gets brutal. You already know when February slows down and when April picks back up. You already know which periods reliably create strain. That knowledge is valuable. Strong macro-rhythms make that knowledge visible so the system can carry it forward, even when people change.

Three Questions Before You Open Your August Calendar

I want to offer you something concrete before the urgency of August makes everything feel equally important again.

Before you start planning next year, ask yourself these three questions.

1. Where did the system exhale this year and where didn’t it?

Not where you personally tried to rest. Where did the system create intentional lighter periods? Where were the scheduled moments of reduced intensity, integration, or stabilization? If you’re struggling to name them, that’s the answer.

2. What work was carried by people that should have been carried by structure?

What decisions were you making repeatedly that a clear protocol could have made once? What recurring confusion could a communication rhythm have resolved? What invisible work accumulated because expectations were never fully clarified? These aren’t rhetorical questions. They’re your improvement priorities for next year.

3. What is one season next year you can design around instead of reacting to?

You don’t need to redesign the entire year in July. But you can pick one pressure window you already know is coming and build something intentional around it. That’s where macro-rhythm work starts. Not with a full annual plan, but with one honest acknowledgment that the pattern is predictable and you can prepare for it.

You Didn’t Sign Up to White-Knuckle It Forever

I’ve been in education for over twenty-five years as a teacher, a leader, a consultant, and a researcher. One thing I’ve seen consistently is that the most dedicated school leaders are often the ones most at risk of burning out, because they’re the ones most willing to absorb what the system can’t hold.

That’s not sustainable. And more importantly, it’s not necessary.

You didn’t go into this work to survive every year and recover in July. You went in to build something for students, for teachers, and for your community. You can’t build if you’re always in survival mode.

The work of designing rhythms isn’t glamorous. Nobody is going to cheer when you create a macro-rhythm calendar or map your pain points for the year. But the teachers in your building will feel it. You will feel it. And the school you’re building will be one that can actually sustain improvement without burning out the people inside it.

That’s what Beyond Relationships is about.

It’s not a relationships book, even though relationships are woven through everything in it. It’s a systems book about building the structures, rhythms, decision-making frameworks, and communication pathways that allow schools to work without depending on heroics. There are tools and protocols to answer the, “OK, but how?” question we often ask when the need for systems comes up.