District director tweets on the run

By now, Dave Doty's subordinates have gotten used to receiving tweets and text messages from him at ridiculous hours when he's on the road, literally. He runs at dawn every morning on the streets near his home in Sandy and conducts a little business en route.

The question is, does this man ever really stop running?

Since taking over as superintendent of the newly created Canyons School District, he has been in a dead sprint trying to prepare for the arrival of 33,000 students in August.

"I got a tweet from him at 5:28 a.m. just as he was going out for a run, and that's not unusual," says Jeff Haney, the district's director of communication.

Fourteen- and 15-hour days are pretty much the norm for Doty.

It isn't easy creating a new school district. Especially this one. Two years ago, the east side voted to split from Jordan School District and form its own district — Utah's first new district in almost 100 years. If they do it again in the next century it will be too soon.

From the start this had all the elements of a contentious split, and it delivered one. It was about as friendly as a Charlie Sheen divorce.

On the one side, there was the perception of the east side as wealthy snobs who selfishly wanted only to help their own kids. On the other side, east-siders were frustrated that most of their exorbitant property taxes were being pumped into west-side schools, which was occurring as a natural outgrowth of the westward-expanding valley population. While the west received new, modern facilities, the east was languishing in aging school buildings (average age: 38) with outdated media centers, athletic fields, libraries, etc.

Even so, the split barely passed with the voters — 53 percent to 47 — which demonstrated a certain lack of support even on the east side. Bottom line: Alta, Cottonwood Heights, Draper, Midvale and Sandy seceded from the union.

Doty stepped into the middle of this, and no one even put a gun to his head.

"It's a lot like running," he says. "If you've trained appropriately, you can do it."

Doty is prepared and then some; he might even be overqualified. He has a B.A. in Spanish from BYU, a master's degree in education from Stanford, a law degree from BYU and a Ph.D. in educational leadership from BYU. His resume covers 17 pages. A former Spanish teacher, he practiced law for a while, specializing in defending public schools and colleges.