John Dunworth, 81; Former Santa Ana Educator Saved a Florida Elementary School

John Dunworth, a lifelong educator and former superintendent of the Santa Ana School District who left retirement to rescue a tiny Florida school by becoming its principal, serving at the salary of $1 for the year, has died. He was 81.

Dunworth died Monday at his Pensacola, Fla., home of a blood condition.

A native of Los Angeles, Dunworth was educated at UC Berkeley and USC, and during a 50-year career in education, served as an administrator in Lawndale and Torrance, as well as president of Peabody College for Teachers (now part of Vanderbilt University) in Tennessee.

He also held administrative posts in Kansas, Indiana and Hawaii and with Department of Defense dependents’ schools in the Pacific and Far East.

He retired in 1991 after serving as interim dean in the School of Education at Cal State San Bernardino.

While living in Florida, Dunworth read about the plight of tiny Munson Elementary School in the Blackwater River State Forest, 40 miles northeast of Pensacola.

The school was threatened with closure in the wake of declining enrollment, high costs and low test scores. Dunworth, then 73, thought that he could make a difference if he became principal.

“I don’t think any decision I have ever made was so clear,” Dunworth told the Associated Press shortly after volunteering for the post in 1997.

“I thought that if I could help, this was where I should be.”

To make it all legal, he agreed to $1 in annual pay.

Starting with just 67 students, he worked with a handful of teachers and many Munson parents and volunteers to turn things around. School costs went down, enrollment stabilized and test scores increased significantly. The threat of closure lifted, and Munson is still in operation.

“They were willing to fight, and I was willing to stand beside them and we’d march together,” Dunworth told AP in 2000, the same year his book, “The Dollar-a-Year Principal: Miracle at Munson,” was published.

David Johnson, a Munson teacher who succeeded Dunworth as principal of the school, told AP: “The primary thing he did for us was being a source of inspiration. We saw how much he really believed what this little school could become.”

Dunworth later said that Munson “showed that given the right circumstances, teachers and children and the community can pull together to beat the odds.”

His dollar in salary, which was given to him later in a frame, went up on his wall at home.

As for his role in the endeavor, as he said in taking the job of superintendent for Santa Ana Unified School District in 1982, “I like a challenge. I like to be where I can make a contribution.”

During World War II, Dunworth was with the U.S. Maritime Service. In the 1970s, he was president of the American Assn. of Colleges of Teacher Education.

He is survived by his wife, Lavona Walden Dunworth, and a sister, Margaret Rice of Lake Elsinore.