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Schools and principals go together like doctors and hospitals, peanut butter and chocolate, or spit and baseball.

Sure, there are days when principals stay home with the flu or occasionally take a leave of absence when life happens.

But there's always an expectation they'll be back.

That model could change, though, as site councils across the Tucson Unified School District try to figure out how they want to spend precious, shrinking resources at their schools.

Each one has until April 30 to decide how to adapt to budget cuts of up to 18 percent, whether it means shuttering libraries, losing counselors or cutting back on administrative positions.

Some are poised to scale back on vice principals. Others are looking at half-time principals.

But that freedom to choose also means choosing no principal, if they can come up with a way to ensure duties typically carried out by principals are still completed.

On the layoff list the Governing Board approved Tuesday were seven principals; their site councils are still analyzing their options.

Superintendent Elizabeth Celania-Fagen said there are schools across the country that have gone sans principal, but it would require a detailed plan here. Schools must explain how they'd evaluate teachers, provide professional development to staff, handle discipline and complete the necessary reporting.

"You can't not do the things a principal does," she said, "but I'm open to considering alternatives."

Diana Tolton, whose daughter, Amanda, is an eighth-grader at Alice Vail Middle School, currently has the unenviable position of sitting on the site council and sifting through numbers to see what the school can afford.

But the leadership of Principal David Ross is non-negotiable, she said.

"The leadership sets the tone of the school," she said, adding she also has a hard time figuring out who would end up watching the budget, complying with new education regulations and meeting with district officials.

"Teachers don't have time for that. They just don't."

For all its rarity, the idea isn't as far-fetched as it might seem.

Although TUSD in recent years has only gone as far as having principals split their time between two schools — an idea that was discarded after parental complaints but then began again a year later — it's happening elsewhere.

Phi Delta Kappan, a professional education journal, has run research papers highlighting a growing debate in the country about reforming the top-down leadership structure at schools, indicating teacher-led school models are becoming more popular in some parts of the country.

There are at least 14 such schools in Minnesota, another dozen in Wisconsin and a few in California.

Granted, they're almost all small charter schools. But the model could catch on, especially given that The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation just donated $1.2 million to EdVisions Schools — one of the front-runners of the teacher-ownership model — to strengthen its national network and to support the creation of another 100 innovative high schools.

Becky Yuzna, a 41-year-old special-education teacher, has been teaching in the teacher-led Avalon School in St. Paul, Minn., for two years. Avalon is among the most pure teacher-run models in the country. Its constitution even sets up a student congress that can weigh in on major school policies, which the teachers sitting as the executive branch can amend or veto.

It wouldn't work for everyone, Yuzna concedes, predicting that trying to find consensus among 250 faculty members in a large school would be "brutal." And she said there has to be staff buy-in because being in charge of everything doesn't necessarily work with locking up at 4 p.m.

But her staff of 27 meets every week and the process works efficiently, rarely bogging down in democratic gridlock.

"I really like it," she said. "Everybody's part of the process and when it comes to any decision that gets made, from the budget to the curriculum, we all agree on how to move forward."

Jon Schroeder, a senior associate with the non-partisan, non-profit Education/Evolving, a Minnesota-based think tank, said there's a paucity of academic research on the results of such schools, given that they're relatively recent start-ups that took off with the growing charter-school movement. Anecdotally, though, he said they seem to be successful, with the EdVisions schools that caught the Gateses' attention solidly in the top quartile of the state charters.

Anecdotally, he said, teachers are willing to work harder and longer hours if they have a say in what happens at their school, and that translates into student buy-in, too. "If they see their teachers are in charge and are able to make changes in the school, then it seems like the students are more motivated themselves."

Early results also show taxpayers get a good deal, he said.

"It seems counterintuitive, when you think about economies of scale and all that, but it seems like the closer the decision-making is to the classroom, the more cost-effective the operations of the school and the more money ends up getting spent in the classroom."

Elizabeth Krause, an associate professor in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst's anthropology department, said that while she conducted ethnographic research in Italy in the mid-1990s, her daughter went to an elementary school with no principal on site. Under that model, she said, every classroom elected a parent representative to serve on the school council.

"The role was taken seriously," she said, adding she was required to call every parent at least once a month to check in on any concerns and then take them to the full council for action.

There's been little U.S. research on such models, she said, suggesting it's a "taboo topic."

And with good reason, said Mike Smith, the legislative consultant for the Arizona School Administrators. The primary responsibility of a principal, he said, is to ensure there's continuity year to year, such as from fourth- to fifth-grade curriculum, as well as a connection between grade levels districtwide.

"That's going to be done by committee?" he asked.

Site councils already exist to allow parents and teachers an advisory role, he said.

Sam Hughes Elementary Principal Roseanne DeCesari, who was on the layoff list, said she hasn't seen a proposal for a wholesale eradication of her office, but she's waiting to see if her site council is going to cut her position to half-time.

Principals have to juggle budget issues, facilitate communication between parents and teachers, address poverty, social needs and academic shortcomings while still meeting reporting mandates. On top of that, they have to be there when bees swarm or a student hides in the bathroom or if there's a twisted ankle on the basketball court.

"If teachers are in classrooms with students all day long, and an emergency comes up, somebody has to handle that situation," she said. "Those kinds of things don't go away when there's not a principal."

If budget cuts really do reach 15 or 18 percent at Sam Hughes, early plans indicate that school won't have a choice but to go to a half-time principal. She's hopeful things will change.

"I feel like we need to take all the time we can take. We are trying desperately to keep our school at some level of service that kids recognize," she said.

Principals keep things running, she said, usually without a lot of fanfare. She's fearful of what could happen otherwise.

"If I'm doing my job right, kids won't know all of the things I do. When they think of me, I'd rather that they think, 'She taught me to jump rope.' "

On StarNet: Now you can review the employees given notice in Marana and Catalina Foothills in addition to TUSD. Go to azstarnet.com/special/ schoolcuts to see a list of all the laid-off employees, searchable by school.