Ask almost anyone who absorbs the worst of a parent's temper inside a school building and the answer comes back the same: the teacher. She is the one in the room every day, the one whose grading decisions land in your inbox at 9 p.m., and the one whose name is attached to the report card. That assumption is so natural that the researchers who study school violence for a living carried it into their own work.

They were wrong.

A study published in July in the journal Psychology of Violence found that after pandemic restrictions lifted, 77 percent of school administrators reported experiencing verbal or threatening aggression from parents, roughly three and a half times the rate reported by teachers. Mental health staff, counselors and social workers reported less than administrators did too. The people running the building, the ones formally charged with keeping everyone in it safe, turned out to be the most exposed.

Eric Anderman, a professor of educational psychology and vice provost for regional campuses at Ohio State University, led the research. "We didn't fully expect such a pattern to emerge," he said. His team went in assuming teachers would carry the load, for the obvious reason that teachers have the most contact with students.

The study focused on verbal aggression in schools rather than physical assault, on the grounds that a 2022 meta-analysis found the verbal category to be far more common. The researchers measured eight specific behaviors: obscene remarks or gestures, intimidation, identity-based slurs, verbal threats, bullying, public humiliation, cyberbullying and sexual harassment.

"Every difficult student I've met, I've eventually met the parent. Then it made sense," an administrator in New York's DOE told us.

The breakdown after restrictions lifted is worth sitting with in detail. More than four in ten administrators reported being verbally threatened. Around one in five reported being publicly humiliated or cyberbullied. Teachers were not spared either: more than one in four said a parent had publicly humiliated them, and more than one in four reported being cyberbullied. But the concentration at the top of the building is the finding that reorders the picture.

The work comes out of the American Psychological Association's Task Force on Violence Against Educators and School Personnel, which has now surveyed more than 35,000 people across all 50 states and Puerto Rico. Anderman's co-authors are spread across DePaul, Berkeley, Rutgers, Hunter College, the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and UCLA.

The tempting read is that COVID broke something and it has not been repaired. The data resists that narrative. During the height of restrictions, when most schools had gone remote and there was physically no building to storm into, 42 percent of administrators still reported verbal or threatening parent aggression. Two out of five, through a screen.

Rates then climbed after schools reopened, which is where the 77 percent figure comes from. So the pandemic did not create the pattern. It elevated an existing one and then armed it with a new set of delivery mechanisms, including the comment thread and the group chat, which do not require anyone to be in the same room.

There is a structural logic to this that becomes obvious once the data forces the question. A teacher is the first stop. A principal is the appeal. By the time a parent reaches the main office, the conversation has usually already failed somewhere else, and the emotional stakes have compounded. The administrator is also the person who owns every decision a parent experiences as institutional rather than personal: the suspension, the placement, the transportation route, the bus that did not come, the policy that will not bend for one family.

Those decisions have multiplied. Administrators in New York school districts now sit at the center of an unusually dense cluster of new obligations, from cellphone restrictions to graduation redesign to the state's new school immigration rules, which turn on procedures the front office is responsible for adopting and communicating to families. Every one of those is a legitimate policy change. Every one of them also converts the principal's office into the place where a parent's frustration with the state arrives wearing a local face.

The consequence that ought to concern families is not primarily about fairness to adults. It is about who is willing to take these jobs, and for how long.

New York already shows the strain in public. The New York State School Boards Association maintains a running list of district vacancies that reads, in any given month, like a map of churn from Long Island to the North Country. Peekskill's current superintendent search offers a minimum salary of $285,000 with an anticipated start date of January 2027, which is what it costs now to persuade a qualified school district leader to take on a mid-sized district and everything that arrives with it. Small rural districts advertising alongside it are competing for the same shallow pool with a fraction of the money.

Prior research from the same task force found that 49 percent of teachers nationwide had considered quitting or transferring because of violence and threats directed at them. Nobody has produced the equivalent number for principals in New York, in part because nobody is systematically counting. But a school leadership shortage built on people quietly deciding the job is not survivable does not announce itself. It shows up three years later as a district on its fourth superintendent, with a strategic plan nobody has owned long enough to finish.

Anderman describes the phenomenon as an epidemic that stays quiet, and the reason is straightforward: there is no national system for tracking or reporting aggression against school personnel. It receives almost no press attention. And many educators do not report incidents at all, out of a fear that saying so will read as an admission they cannot manage their own building.

Readers of this publication have seen the shape of that problem before in a different dataset. New York's own school safety reporting system, analyzed across seven years by the State Comptroller, produced two headlines that pointed in opposite directions, with serious incidents appearing to collapse largely because the state changed what counted as one, and roughly a quarter of schools reporting zero incidents of any kind. A system that undercounts what happens to students is unlikely to be capturing what happens to the adults, and in fact the state's reporting categories were never built to.

What fills the gap instead is anecdote. In earlier work, the task force gathered roughly 3,000 written accounts from teachers describing the worst thing that had happened to them. Anderman's summary of the responses was that some people thanked the researchers simply for asking, because nobody ever had.

The most useful part of the study is the part least likely to be quoted, because it is not alarming. The researchers found that aggression was measurably lower where certain conditions held, and those conditions held at all three time points, before the pandemic, during it and after.

Strong parent teacher relationships were associated with less aggression. So was meaningful administrative support for staff, and so were disciplinary policies that were clear enough for everyone to know what they were. At the community level, a perception that the district was genuinely invested in education correlated with lower aggression as well, which is a finding with uncomfortable implications for districts that have spent a decade communicating with families mostly through budget crises and deficit notices.

The researchers recommend tiered systems of support that reach classroom, school and community levels rather than treating this as an individual coping problem. They also flag something smaller and stranger: the value of proactive, positive communication from schools to parents. Anderman, who has spent a career studying academic motivation, still remembers his ninth grade Spanish teacher calling his mother to say he was doing well. He notes that it was the only time it ever happened.

None of this argues that parents should be quieter. Parents who push are frequently the reason a child gets an evaluation, a placement, a transfer, an accommodation that the system was not going to volunteer. Advocacy is not aggression, and a school leader who cannot tell the difference is a different kind of problem.

But the distinction is real, and it is not subtle in practice. Demanding a meeting is advocacy. Posting a principal's home address in a parents' group is not. Filing a complaint is advocacy. Screaming a slur across a parking lot is not. The line is not drawn at intensity or at anger, which are both appropriate responses to a school failing your child. It is drawn at whether the pressure lands on the decision or on the person.

School climate is usually discussed as something schools produce and families consume, a quality you evaluate when you are deciding where to buy a house. This study is a reminder that it runs in both directions, and that the adults who set the tone in a building are also absorbing whatever tone the community sends back. The relationship between principal turnover and a district's long-term trajectory is well documented and rarely good. If the job becomes one that only the unusually thick-skinned will accept, the pool of people running schools narrows to a personality type rather than a skill set.

The next time a school board meeting turns ugly, or a district posts yet another leadership vacancy with an unusually generous salary attached, it is worth asking a question the data now supports. Not whether the administrator deserved it. Whether anyone else is going to want the job.