November 27, 2024
BANGOR DAILY NEWS (BANGOR, MAINE

Jim Doughty has spent the last 13 years being Bangor’s single-minded, top-down, performance-driven school superintendent, which, as it turns out, was exactly what Bangor needed after years of division and drift. With his retirement at the end of this month, his legacy is well in place: A school system that provides support for students from the earliest grades, stresses academic achievement and expects its graduates to continue with their educations well beyond high school.

Ask school-board members around the state how their last search for a new superintendent went and the polite among them simply will call it quite a challenge. In Maine and elsewhere, it is growing more and more difficult to find qualified applicants. That’s not because the job is so complicated. In fact, it is disarmingly simple: Educate a wide diversity of students while attending to the needs of teachers, school staff, parents, taxpayers and state bureaucrats, and since society can think of no other place to solve its problems, solve those too. It is so simple that any number people are willing, even eager, to second-guess a superintendent and offer all sorts of interesting advice on how he could do his job better.

But Superintendent Doughty has thrived under this challenge because he has known what he wanted to accomplish, could persuasively explain his goals and build support for them. There is perhaps no more optimistic belief in a system of government than that it can provide a free education to all citizens so that they are able to achieve as much as their talents and hard work will allow. Mr. Doughty is the ultimate optimist; he has repeated more times than anyone could count Every child can learn and learn at a high level, and has built programs that lifted struggling students and tested the brightest.

More than a local educator, however, Mr. Doughty is a veteran of the state budget battles and was among the first to recognize and protest funding formula changes a decade ago that deprived mostly rural and northern communities of badly needed school dollars. Last year, he was part of a coalition that pushed the Legislature to both improve the formula and substantially raise funding levels, though not nearly as much as coalition members hoped. Don’t be surprised to see Mr. Doughty continue this fight in his retirement.

On Thursday, members of the Bangor School Committee honored their retiring superintendent by renaming Fifth Street Middle School after him. It was a fitting response to the many honors he helped bring to the Bangor school system during his tenure and a reminder of the values that brought the success.


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