After more than 50 years with the ConVal School District, Dick Dunning – former teacher, principal, School Board member and for the past two years, chair of the ConVal School Board – stepped down for good on March 11. 

“Someone asked me the other day, what was the best part of my career? Teaching, by far,  was the most-enjoyable thing I have done over all these years,” he said. 

Dunning still has a poem written to him by a Shippensburg University student in 1985, where he was teaching professional courses. 

“You reached out and touched my heart, and made a difference in my ways, and I thank you. You are a REAL teacher,” the student wrote.

“This says it all for me. This is what teaching is all about, making that connection,” Dunning said. 

Dunning, who grew up in Dublin, attended Dublin Consolidated when it was a school for kindergarten through eighth grade. At the time, the building had just four classrooms, all combined grades, with gym, shop, and home economics space in the basement.

After DCS, Dunning attended Peterborough High School, graduating in 1965. He then enrolled at Keene State to major in education, but the Vietnam War had other plans.

After Dunning was classified 1A by the Draft Board, he knew he was guaranteed to get drafted, and he enlisted in Army Officer Candidate School to become a paratrooper. While Dunning was in training at Fort Pope in Louisiana, a Green Beret came to talk to the new recruits about Special Forces, and Dunning volunteered. After completing Airborne School, Dunning joined the Green Berets, a division of the Army Special Forces.

In the summer of 1968, Dunning’s platoon was hit by automatic weapons fire, and his left leg was seriously injured. Unable to walk,  Dunning was medevaced to Japan. He was eventually sent to Fort Devens, Mass., to rehabilitate, and was able to visit Dublin while he healed. He turned 21 years old in Vietnam.

Once he was released from the Army, Dunning returned to Keene State, married his high school sweetheart, Wendy, and returned to Dublin Consolidated School to complete his student teaching. Jim Grant, who the principal of DCS at the time, asked longtime DCS teacher Barbara Fontaine to come out of retirement to serve as Dunning’s mentor teacher in fall 1972. By January, Dunning had his teaching certification, Fontaine went back into retirement and Dunning transitioned into the teacher of the third-grade class.

The next year, Dunning moved into a grade six class. He later became teaching principal of DCS until 1986, when he transitioned to South Meadow Middle School. 

“They say you either love middle school, or you’re just not there. I loved it from day one,” Dunning said. 

In 1989, Dunning was named assistant principal of SMS, and became principal in 2000. In 2005, SMS was named Middle School of the Year, and won the honor again in 2009. In 2006, Dunning was named Principal of the Year. He served as principal of SMS until 2013, when he retired.

“Only two middle schools in the state were named Middle School of the Year more than once, and it was us and Great Brook,” Dunning said.

Dunning says he “planned to do nothing” after his retirement, but when a six-month vacancy came up on the ConVal Select Board, he agreed to fill it just for the six months. After the six months, he ran for a three-year term, and stayed until 2025.

“I thought I knew all about what the School Board did after working in the district my whole career, but I had no clue.  The time commitment is astronomical. People have no idea,” Dunning said. 

Trust, respect and relationships are the recurring themes in Dunning’s long experience as an educator.

“You have to have the relationships. People have to respect you, and they have to trust you,” Dunning said. “That is something I see today that is missing. People don’t have that trust, and trust is critical to a community. People say they don’t trust the School Board. I say, ‘Then elect someone you trust. You elected the person you have to represent you.’”

As a teacher, Dunning worked to earn the respect of student, teachers and parents alike.  

“In the military, I learned,  as an officer, that lieutenants and sergeants had to feel comfortable coming to you and telling you something when you didn’t have the whole story. It is the same with teaching; I couldn’t always know every single thing that was happening in the building. In my school, anyone could come to me, from my assistant principal to the lunch or custodial staff, and say, ‘Dick, what were you thinking? Why did you do this?’  And they knew I would listen, and sometimes I was wrong,” Dunning said. “I wasn’t always right; I relied on people to tell me when I wasn’t right. People needed to feel they could come to me without retribution, which is key.” 

Dunning said of his decades with public school students: “The majority of the kids are just great; they are just wonderful, wonderful individuals. The same thing was true of my staff; very few are problems. If you hold all the adults to one standard, if you hold people accountable to the same rules, the children will emulate that.”

Dunning recalled how soon after he started at SMS, the district adapted a new behavior program introducing measurable criteria for impacts on student behavior, such as how classes walked in the hallways or how they behaved at lunch. 

“We all agreed, as a school, that we were going to do this. Then I noticed the eighth-grade team was not stepping up to the plate. I called the whole team all into my office, and I said, ‘This is not a dialogue. This is a monologue, and I’m telling you right now, this is what we are doing. We all agreed to this, and if you don’t do it, I am going to be all over you,’” Dunning said. “I held them accountable, and it changed to culture of the school.”

Dunning said he had great support from the superintendent at the time, Dick Bergeron.

“He trusted me to run my school, and he didn’t interfere. He said, ‘Dick, you know what I like about you? You the keep garbage off my desk,’” Dunning said. “Those relationships, that trust, is so important. It allows you to be able to take educational risks, to try new things and experiment.”

Over the decades, Dunning has seen many trends in education come and go. One of his fondest memories was when DCS stopped using basal readers and switched to a novel-based curriculum, using trade books to teach reading and content areas.

“When we read real books, we could talk about real issues. The students could get beyond recalling and interpreting, and they could move into higher-level thinking – extrapolation, analysis and evaluation. Kids love reading, and they loved reading real books,” he said.

Also at DCS, Dunning taught a sixth-grade science unit on animal dissection.

“The kids absolutely loved it. The hospital donated scrubs and medical gowns, and my sixth-graders went and demonstrated their sheep heart dissections at ConVal, all dressed like surgeons,” Dunning said. “I had maybe one parent complain when his child came home and talked about blowing air into a sheep lung with a straw.” 

Dunning feels too much is put on teachers in today’s educational environment, and that teachers are burdened by too many restrictions and requirements. 

“You have to let teachers drive instruction; you have to allow them to do what they need to do to reach the kids. Every teacher has a different way of connecting with kids. You have to have a high level of trust in the classroom,” he said. “If the kids trust you, you can do no wrong. In the end, you are what the kids say you are when they talk about you at home at night.” 

Dunning said in all his years in the district, he had never seen a superintendent get a standing ovation until Ann Forrest started in fall 2024. 

“It was amazing. That is how well respected she is, and that shows the trust that people have in her,” he said. “It makes a big difference that she is part of the community; that she lives here, that the community trusts her. I see a bright future ahead.”