HUNTINGTON BEACH : Edison High School Dean Will Retire

Award-winning educator Jim Buhman, dean of students at Edison High School since 1984, has announced that he will retire at the end of the school year in June.

Buhman, 60, who came to the Huntington Beach Union High School District in 1966 as an advanced math teacher at Marina High School, received the Outstanding Contribution to Education Award earlier this spring from the Orange County Department of Education.

Buhman, a native of Missouri and the youngest of 13 children, several years ago instituted the Saturday study program at Edison as an academic alternative to weekend detention for students who got in trouble for being tardy or for disrupting classes.

Students in the detention program got three hours of credit and assistance from a classroom teacher.

Buhman, who also supervises the Edison math program, frequently tutors students during lunch hours and after school.

“I get calls from parents whose sons and daughters are having trouble in math. I ask (the students) to come by, and I’ll see if I can help them out.

“It’s fun for me to do, and the students look at me as a different type of person, not someone who’s hammering them all the time and meting out punishment,” said Buhman, who acknowledges that the traditional role of the dean is often that of disciplinarian.

Among his other contributions, Buhman coordinated the school’s major construction project that prepared Edison for its merger with the guidance center for severely handicapped children. The program opened in September.

Buhman, who did his undergraduate work at South Dakota State University and advanced studies at Cal State Long Beach, believes that schools are doing an excellent job with the money they get, but that drastic cuts make for “very difficult times.”

He describes students as about the same as ever--some real good, a few not so good--and says they are learning “tremendously more” than they used to, thanks to the development of calculators, which give teachers a simple tool that permit them to get more difficult concepts across.

His wife, Carol, teaches economics and homemaking at Fountain Valley High School and is not retiring.

“We like to tell everyone we met in junior high school in Long Beach,” Buhman said. “We did, we were teachers together” at Hamilton Junior High School.