Why ICS Bangkok's Headmaster Almost Regretted the Promotion

Luc Lemley, headmaster of the International Community School of Bangkok, took the job in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic and spent much of his first year wondering if he'd made a mistake. "There were many days where I was like, man, what have I done?" he said on an early episode of the school's student-run podcast, Students Incorporated. It's an unusually candid admission, and it turns out his timing wasn't a coincidence. Lemley stepped into school leadership right as researchers were about to document the worst stretch for principal retention in decades.

A profession in crisis, right on schedule

Lemley took over as headmaster from a retiring predecessor he refers to as Mr. Darin, after several years as ICS Bangkok's high school principal. "Moving into the headmaster's position in the middle of a COVID pandemic was not ideal by any means," he said.

He wasn't alone. A RAND Corporation analysis of survey data from the American School District Panel found U.S. school districts reported principal turnover jumping from roughly 3 percent before the pandemic to 16 percent during the 2021-2022 school year, nearly five times the historical rate. Parallel surveys by the National Association of Secondary School Principals found that almost 40 percent of school leaders were planning to leave the job within a few years, citing safety concerns, staffing shortages, and burnout. Education Week captured the mood in a February 2023 headline asking, bluntly, "Is This the Beginning of the Principal Exodus?"

Lemley's account, recorded an ocean away from the U.S. school systems those surveys tracked, reads like a case study of exactly what researchers were picking up in the numbers. "I felt like a lot of my job last year was COVID-related and COVID-focused," he said, describing reopening logistics, parent communication, and the daily uncertainty of running a school through a health crisis. "That was honestly, on a daily basis, not the most enjoyable experience." Even RAND's own researchers were careful about how far to take the comparison: lead author Melissa Kay Diliberti cautioned Education Week that a single year of elevated turnover doesn't necessarily prove a lasting exodus, since it could just as easily reflect principals who had delayed retirement to see their schools through the worst of the pandemic. Either reading fits what Lemley describes: a leader who stayed, but who found the year brutal enough to wonder if staying was the right call.

The switch nobody warns you about

What makes Lemley's account more interesting than a simple pandemic-burnout story is what came before it: the jump from teacher to principal had already reshuffled his sense of who he was at work, and running the school reshuffled it again.

As a teacher (he taught world geography and modern history at ICS Bangkok after joining in 2009), Lemley says his priority was almost entirely relational. "I was more concerned about them really getting inspired and enjoying the subject than I was with the actual details and information they were learning on a daily basis," he said of his students. Moving into the high school principal's office meant trading that closeness for something colder: policy, discipline, hundreds of relationships instead of the handful he could actually maintain day to day. "I don't have the relationships with a hundred students like I did when I was teaching all the time," he said. Even so, he says he loved being principal: he "genuinely" enjoyed "almost every single day" of it.

Headmaster turned out to be a different job again. Where the principal role was still built around a single school population, the headmaster's chair put him a level further removed from students, managing other administrators and representing the school to the wider community, including parents and the board, during the most disruptive stretch education had seen in a generation. Writing about the same pandemic-era turnover wave, Johns Hopkins researcher Annette Anderson told Education Week that school systems needed to stop treating the principalship as a job people hold for two or three decades and start planning leadership pipelines around shorter, higher-turnover tenures, an acknowledgment that the modern version of the role asks something structurally different of the people who take it.

International schools add a wrinkle American public districts don't have to manage. A 2025 study in the Journal of Research in International Education, based on surveys of 177 heads of school worldwide, found that international school heads now stay in the job an average of 4.8 years, up from 3.7 years in a 2011 benchmark and 2.8 years in the original 1994 study, but still short by almost any professional standard. Researcher Allan Morrison found the leading causes of early departure weren't primarily burnout but governance: board turnover, non-renewed contracts, and the pressure of answering to parent communities whose interests don't always align. Against that backdrop, a headmaster who sticks around long enough to look back on a rough first year is, statistically, something of an outlier.

Lemley says he tried to reclaim some of what the promotion took away. He's usually on campus by 6 a.m., before the halls fill up, and makes a point of showing up to lunch, to soccer games, to whatever after-school activity is happening, trying to stay a visible presence on campus rather than a name on an office door.

Kindness as the fallback plan

Lemley says he never consciously decided what kind of principal or headmaster to be: serious, approachable, "good cop" or otherwise. What he settled on instead was a floor he tried not to drop below: be kind regardless of the situation. "I can always be nice no matter what the situation is," he said. "I can be nice even if a student's getting disciplined." Asked for closing advice at the end of the interview, he didn't reach for a leadership framework. He said simply: "Be kind to one another. Love each other."

"There were many days where I was like, man, what have I done?"

It's worth knowing how Lemley got into education, because the same instinct runs underneath everything else. By his own account he was a solid C student at Bradley High School, a public school of roughly 3,000 students in Cleveland, Tennessee, more interested in wrestling, pottery class, and friends than academics. (His most memorable high school moment involved totaling his car, and a truck full of vegetables headed to market, in full view of classmates arriving for the day.) He didn't set out to teach. A history professor's storytelling in college left an impression, but the real turning point came later, on a trip to Ghana that his wife took for her graduate studies. Lemley tagged along and, to pass the time, ended up teaching a few social studies classes at a local school. His mentor teacher there watched him work and, in tears, told him afterward that he was made for it. He was thirty by the time he got into teaching.

Two years into the chair

By the time this conversation aired, Lemley was in his second year as headmaster, and the tone of the interview shifts noticeably by the end, from someone still bracing for the job to someone starting to trust it. "Things got better over the course of the year, and I think I started to settle in finally, and it's been fun," he said. His wife had asked him the night before the recording whether he actually liked the new job. "I'm like, yeah, actually I do," he said. "This time last year, I don't know that I could have said that."

That arc, a rough first year giving way to something sturdier, tracks with what the national data eventually showed, too. RAND's most recent update, published in April 2025, found principal turnover had fallen back to about 8 percent by the 2023-2024 school year, still above pre-pandemic levels but well off the 2021-2022 peak. Lemley, for his part, is still listed as ICS Bangkok's headmaster on the school's website years later, one more data point, alongside the national numbers, suggesting the roughest stretch for school leaders really was a stretch, and not a permanent state.

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