photo by: Elvyn Jones

Baldwin High School senior Hollie Hutton receives her diploma from Baldwin school district Superintendent Paul Dorathy. Hutton was one of 101 members of the Class of 2016 to graduate at the ceremony at the Baldwin Middle School gymnasium.

Paul Dorathy ended 16 sometimes challenging years as superintendent of the Baldwin City school district with his retirement on Thursday.

Dorathy officially retired on June 30, the final day of the fiscal year. Mark Dodge, the former director of school improvement and communications for the Eudora district, succeeded him in the position the next day.

Dorathy took over at the Baldwin City district the same year that Rick Doll started as superintendent of the Lawrence school district and Marty Kobza was in his sixth year as superintendent in Eudora. During that time, Dorathy oversaw a successful bond referendum and put laptop computing devices in the hands of all district students.

He also led the district through the fiscally difficult years of the Great Recession and those associated with the tax- and budget-cutting policies of former Gov. Sam Brownback, as well as the COVID-19 pandemic.

“We’ve certainly had our challenges over the years,” he reflected in a phone interview Thursday. “It’s part of the job. You find the best path forward.”

In the key area of enrollment, which is now at about 1,350 students, the district has not changed much since the first few years after Dorathy’s arrival in 2006, when two new large subdivisions near Baldwin High School were quickly filling with new homes. That growth ended in 2008 with the start of a steep and lengthy recession brought on by the collapse of a housing bubble.

Baldwin City recovered more slowly from the housing slump than Lawrence, Eudora or Johnson County did and only started to bounce back in recent years. That slow recovery and a lower birth rate during the recession has contributed to the Baldwin City school district’s stagnant enrollment as classes of children from those recession years progressed through school, Dorathy said.

“We grew for a while after I arrived, but then enrollment stagnated,” he said. “We actually had decreased enrollment for three years before leveling off this year. I do think the birth rate was lower with parents being cautious during the recession. Hopefully, that has turned around and the district will start growing again.”

Steady or declining enrollment presents challenges because the state’s school-funding formula rewards growing districts. That issue was compounded when Brownback, elected in 2010, started cutting planned increases to education budgets. That education funding pinch was addressed when the Kansas Supreme Court issued the first of a number of rulings, finding the Kansas Legislature was not adequately funding K-12 education and ordering it to provide more money to public schools. Dorathy said funding would remain a concern for the district because the added funding from the last court ruling in 2019 would soon expire.

photo by: Contributed

Paul Dorathy ended 16 years as superintendent of the Baldwin City school district with his recent retirement.

“I think funding is going to get very tight,” he said. “We did get the court-ordered extra money the past five years, but after that drops off, it will go back to the Legislature deciding how much to provide. I think funding will be a challenge for our district and all districts in the state.”

The two back-to-back funding crunches prompted the district school board to make a controversial decision in 2012 to close elementary schools in the rural communities of Worden and Vinland.

Despite the difficulties, Dorathy did oversee significant district advances in facilities and technology. Under his leadership, district voters approved in 2008 a $23 million bond issue that built a new elementary school, a district performing arts center, a baseball and softball complex and a new track and field facility. No other bond issue was advanced during his tenure, but Dorathy said the school board is considering future funding mechanisms to address facility upgrades.

During Dorathy’s years, the Baldwin City district was the first in Douglas County to put computing devices in the hands of all district students. That initiative started in 2014 when all Baldwin High School students received iPads that they could take home at night. Eudora provided Chromebooks to its high school students two years later, and the Lawrence school district provided MacBooks to high school students starting with the 2017-2018 school year.

“We now have provided Chromebooks to all junior high school students,” Dorathy said. “Actually, we now have iPads for all elementary students, but not enough for them to take home.”

The one-on-one technology initiative has been key in preparing district students for the 21st century workforce, Dorathy said.

“Did it improve test scores? I don’t know that I can say that,” he said. “But we have seen positive results. What we are seeing is our students are much better problem=solvers because they can gather so much information quickly. It has allowed them to develop the technical skills they are expected to have when they leave school. Employers now expect people to have those technical skills that everyone graduating from our district now has.”

One reason the tech initiatives may not have translated to better test scores is the lost classroom time associated with the COVID-19 pandemic, Dorathy said.

“We’re still playing catch up in getting our students back to where they should be … especially during the spring of 2020 when we had to close all the schools and offer classes at home virtually,” he said.

Obviously, the district could not have shifted to its at-home pandemic curriculum delivery without its technological advances, Dorathy said. Nonetheless, it was a challenging process, in which district administrators and faculty were forced to improvise a new model of academic instruction, he said.

Although the days of home instruction are over, teachers did learn lessons and skills that they are still applying in their classes, Dorathy said.

The former superintendent’s contribution to the Baldwin City community wasn’t limited to its schools. He was on the Baldwin City Chamber of Commerce executive board for four years and was president of the organization in 2014 and 2015.

“It added a lot of work to an already busy schedule, but it was important to do,” he said. “It gave me the opportunity to meet people in the business community. … I really enjoyed the networking opportunities the position provided.”

He is leaving the district in capable hands, Dorathy said. The Baldwin City school board purposefully hired his replacement in December so that Dorathy could prepare that person. Dorathy said he and his successor, Dodge, were in regular contact during the six-month transition.

“We spoke at least once a week on the phone or in person,” he said.

Dorathy and his wife, Cyndi, moved to Topeka from Baldwin City a year ago in anticipation of his retirement. They chose Topeka because it is the geographical center of the couple’s 11 grandchildren. Spending time with the grandchildren is a priority, especially for the next two summer months. After that, they intend to travel.

“We have a goal of visiting all the U.S. national parks,” he said. “We’ve been to 33, but now we have time to see the rest. We’re planning to go to California this fall to visit Yosemite and other parks in that state. I’m looking forward to traveling in the fall. We were never able to do that in the past because of my job.”

He and his wife are not saying goodbye to Baldwin City, Dorathy said.

“We’re going to try to make it back once a month,’ he said. “We’ll be back for all the big events. We will be back for the Maple Leaf Festival.”