How to hire a division head: requirements, pay, sourcing and screening

A division head runs one school within your school: the lower, middle or upper division. Schools use different titles for the same job — upper school head, lower school head, middle school director — but the shape of the work holds.

Before you write a posting, write the profile. Name the grade span the person will own, how many teachers they will supervise, whether they carry a teaching load, and where their authority starts and stops on discipline, scheduling and curriculum.

Decide the span of the job honestly. A division head who also teaches three sections is a different hire from one who is purely administrative, and the difference should show in the posting, the pay and the calendar.

Map the role against the people around it. In a small school the division head may be the only administrator besides the head of school and the business manager. In a larger school, deans, counselors and a learning specialist may sit underneath the role instead.

Be explicit about the first year. A school hiring a division head because of growth needs a builder, while a school hiring after a beloved incumbent leaves needs a steadier hand and a plan for transition. The profile that fits one will screen out the other, so choose deliberately.

The candidate-side view — titles, day-to-day duties and how educators reach the job — is a different question, and our career guide explains what a division head does. The rest of this page stays on the employer's side of the table.

There is no single answer, because different bodies set the requirements in each sector. Which rules bind your school depends on its sector, its state and — for a private school — the school's category under that state's rules. Confirm them before requirements go into a posting.

At a private school, the school's leadership sets the qualifications it wants, inside whatever the state, an accreditor or a religious authority imposes on the school. Public-school norms do not transfer automatically in either direction. Ask rather than assume: your state education agency, your accreditor and, where one applies, your diocese can each tell you what they require of a division head.

Faith requirements work differently at a religious school, and federal statute draws part of that map. Under the ADA's provision for religious educational institutions, a religious school may prefer individuals of a particular religion. It may also require all applicants and employees to conform to its religious tenets — and that provision does not exempt the school from the ADA's Title I employment rules. Keep the faith requirement you set inside what the statutes allow, and have counsel review the requirement and your application materials before you post.

At a charter school, the requirements come from state charter law and your authorizer. Each state writes its own rules on certification and administrator credentials for charter staff, and they differ. Confirm what your state expects of a charter administrator with your authorizer and your state education agency before the posting goes up.

Association and pedagogy credentials are a separate layer: they are a school's or an association's requirement, which sits apart from whatever your state requires. Ask for one when your mission calls for it — a Christian-school association certificate, an AMI or AMS Montessori diploma, a classical-school credential — and verify it with the body that issues it, not from the résumé.

Before you post: leader requirements differ by state, sector and school category. Confirm what binds your school with your state education agency, your charter authorizer, your accreditor or your religious authority — and verify any credential a candidate claims with the body that issued it.

Start with what the data is and is not. BLS has no private-school or charter-school occupation code, and our sources carry no division-head wage series either; the nearest BLS series for school leaders is Education Administrators, Kindergarten through Secondary (SOC 11-9032), which covers education administrators across K-12 schools rather than division heads alone.

With that label attached: in BLS's Occupational Employment and Wage Statistics for May 2025, that occupation had a median annual wage of $105,840 across all elementary and secondary schools — public district, charter and private combined. The 10th to 90th percentile span was $76,380 to $167,760. In privately owned elementary and secondary schools only, the median was $98,020. Whether any charter schools sit inside the privately owned figure is not established. Treat these as the wider administrator market, not as your benchmark.

The closest thing to a division-head-specific benchmark carries its own label. At NAIS member schools, the median salary reported for 2025-26 was $140,000 for lower school division heads and $153,296 for upper school division heads. That is NAIS member schools only — a higher-resourced slice of the independent-school world, not all private schools. Our research found no comparable pay survey for diocesan or other religious-school scales, so ask your diocesan school office or your association for its own figures.

The same NAIS table puts the median head of school salary at $320,000 for 2025-26. The distance between those numbers is the leadership ladder at the schools that report them, and it matters when you price a division head you hope to keep.

Classification is a different question from benchmarking. The Department of Labor's regulations treat principals, deans and curriculum heads as academic administrative employees. For that group, the FLSA salary test can be met at $684 per week — the exempt salary level in the eCFR text as of October 2026 — or at a salary at least equal to the entrance salary for teachers at the same school. That is a wage-hour rule, not a pay target, and classification is fact-specific. Confirm how it applies to your role with counsel or the Department of Labor.

Build your number from your own inputs. NAIS's DASL benchmarking database, run with more than 40 associations, gives members full access to data from all 1,800-plus contributing schools, while nonmembers get limited access through their own partner associations, and the data carries antitrust limits on how it may be used. Add internal equity against your own salary scale, and cost the whole package — base, tuition remission, housing where your model includes it, retirement and professional development — with your business office or CPA before candidates appear.

If your school is a 501(c)(3), the IRS's intermediate-sanctions rules govern excess benefits paid to disqualified people. An excess benefit carries a 25% excise tax, rising to 200% if it is not corrected. The IRS presumes compensation is reasonable when an unconflicted body approves it in advance, relies on appropriate comparability data and documents the basis concurrently. Whether a particular division head counts as a disqualified person depends on the authority they hold — confirm with a CPA before the board votes.

Look inside first, then outside. Your internal bench — department chairs, deans of students, an assistant head — already knows your culture, your families and your curriculum. Run internal candidates through the same profile and rubric as outside candidates, so the comparison runs on evidence rather than familiarity.

Grow the bench before you need it. Give a strong department chair a dean-level project, a scheduling cycle or a role in faculty evaluation, and you will learn more from watching them work than any interview can tell you. A school that never lets teachers lead anything will have no internal bench when the job opens.

Outside, the natural sources are sitting division heads, assistant heads and deans at peer schools, and leaders inside charter networks who run campuses or grade-level teams. Retained search is a separate service from placement: Carney Sandoe, for example, runs a Placement Group for teachers and administrators and a separate Search Group for retained leadership searches; our guide to Carney Sandoe for schools explains how that model works from the school's side. Evaluate firms and agencies unranked, and ask each for references from schools like yours.

Cast the posting net wide: association career centers, faith-tradition networks, referrals from trustees and faculty, and your own listing — the division head jobs page on SchoolHires shows what candidates see. Before you post, check your state's rules on postings. Washington requires covered employers to disclose in each job posting the wage scale or salary range and a general description of benefits, including postings placed through third parties (RCW 49.58.110, effective January 1, 2023 and amended in 2025). Colorado requires compensation, benefits and how to apply in all job postings, internal and public. Pay-disclosure rules differ by state, so confirm with your state labor department.

Leaders moving in from district schools are part of the pool too. A district assistant principal or principal brings system experience in scheduling, discipline and faculty supervision, and the adjustment is governance rather than craft: reporting to a head of school instead of a superintendent, and operating inside one school's culture rather than a district's rules. Treat the sector change as part of the interview, not a disqualifier.

Screening works when the rubric comes first. Turn the profile into a scorecard before the first file arrives: the leadership evidence, the teaching-and-learning depth, the faculty-management record and the family-communication skills your school needs. Score every candidate on the same rubric, so the committee compares evidence instead of impressions.

Ask for a paper trail that matches the job: a résumé showing the arc from teaching to leadership, a statement of educational philosophy, and artifacts — a schedule they built, an evaluation system they ran, a parent conflict they resolved with details redacted. Stage references so you hear them before you have fallen for a finalist, and ask referees about specific duties: how this person evaluated teachers, handled a dismissal, and communicated with unhappy parents.

Structure the rounds to test the profile. One round on teaching and learning, one on faculty leadership — how they evaluate, coach and, when necessary, exit teachers — one on parents and community, and a scenario set: a personnel conflict, a mid-year schedule collapse, an angry parent meeting. Ask the same core questions of every candidate so answers stay comparable, and give finalists real time with the faculty they would lead.

Keep the questions lawful. Title VII covers schools with 15 or more employees for each working day in 20 or more calendar weeks in the current or preceding year. ADA Title I uses the same 15-employee threshold, and the ADEA covers employers with 20 or more. Keep questions off the traits these statutes protect — age, disability, health, family plans among them; at a religious school, faith questions sit inside the allowances the statutes give religious institutions, described above. Have counsel review your interview protocol and application form before the search opens.

Finish the safety work before an offer. A division head will hold authority over children and over the adults who teach them. Run the background checks your state requires of school employees — what binds your school depends on your state and your school's category, and our guide to background checks before the first day walks through the pieces.

One federal law frames the problem: ESSA section 8546 directs states, state education agencies and districts receiving ESSA funds to bar school employees from helping a person land a new school job. It applies where the employer knows or has probable cause to believe the person engaged in sexual misconduct with a minor or student. That duty reaches public and charter schools directly; private schools are covered where state law extends it. The National Child Protection Act offers another route: a state may let qualified entities — organizations providing care to children, a category that can include private schools — request fingerprint-based national criminal history checks on employees through the state. Whether those procedures exist in your state is the first question to ask it. Confirm your state's rules with your state education agency before the offer goes out.

Leadership searches tend to run on a slower clock than faculty hiring: the pool is smaller and the candidates are busier. Start earlier than feels necessary, and build the calendar backwards from the date the new division head must be seated.

The contract cycle shapes what is possible. Sitting leaders may be under contract at their current schools, and their notice obligations — along with those schools' renewal timelines — can set when they can actually start. Ask finalists directly how and when they could begin, and put notice and start dates in writing at the offer stage. Our guide to teacher contracts explains the contract mechanics schools use across the cycle.

A workable backward plan for a start before the next school year: profile and rubric in the fall, sourcing and first-round screening through winter, finalist rounds, reference checks and the background file in early spring, and the signed contract before the current school year ends. Adjust to your reality rather than to a national calendar. Our research found no published industry timeline for division-head searches, and the dates that matter are your incumbent's departure, your faculty calendar and your candidates' notice periods.

Charter governance can add steps — board approval and, where the role touches compliance or reporting, authorizer expectations — so build those into the same backward plan. Keep an emergency lane too. If the vacancy lands in spring — a resignation, a relocation, a medical leave — a defined interim appointment from your internal bench keeps the division running without turning a stopgap into an unexamined permanent hire.

The hire is not finished at signing. Write the first-year plan before the first day: the division's priorities, the authority matrix between you and the division head, and the faculty evaluation duties that anchor the role. The authority matrix names what the division head decides alone, what comes to you, and what goes to the board or the business office.

Handle the paperwork like any other hire. Every U.S. employer, private and charter schools included, must complete Form I-9 for every person hired, citizens included. E-Verify is a separate federal system, run by DHS with the Social Security Administration, that checks Form I-9 information against government records; confirm with DHS whether your school is required to use it.

Price the retention parts of the package deliberately. If the package includes tuition remission for a leader's children, the tax treatment runs through IRC section 117(d). The exclusion covers a qualified tuition reduction, and for highly compensated employees it applies only when the reduction is available on substantially the same terms to a reasonable, nondiscriminatory class of employees — a fact-specific question for your CPA, not a default. If you sponsor a 403(b) plan, its universal-availability rule requires that if any employee may make elective deferrals, all employees must be permitted to, with limited exclusions such as employees normally working fewer than 20 hours a week. Confirm your plan's design with your benefits adviser.

Keep the role by running it well. Agree in advance how and when the division head is evaluated, and separate the evaluation of the division from the evaluation of individual teachers — the division head runs the second and owns the first. Guard the calendar: a role that absorbs every discipline case, every parent call and every scheduling failure burns out its owner, and the fix is authority design, not resilience. Give the person a growth path: committee chairs who see the role up close can become your next internal candidates, and a strong division head who stalls can become a retention risk for the whole leadership team.

A division head hire touches every part of the employment picture — contracts, evaluation, pay design and the faculty your division head will hire. Our guide to hiring for private and charter schools maps the whole cluster.

Employer information, not legal, tax or benefits advice. Confirm what binds your school with your state education agency, your charter authorizer, your accreditor, the Department of Labor, the IRS or counsel, as the question needs.