In the spring of 1995 Jim Bunting made a phone call that changed not only his career, but also the scope of the History Department at Western Reserve Academy.

Bunting was working as a lawyer and senior vice president with ICF Kaiser Engineers in Virginia at the time and considering a career change to education -- primarily in history. After lining up interviews with a few schools, he placed a call to an old college friend -- then Headmaster Henry "Skip" Flanagan -- for a recommendation. Flanagan readily agreed, but had a request of his own: Bunting had to consider WRA.

"I had been thinking about teaching history for a while when I was doing legal work in Washington, D.C.," said Bunting, who holds a bachelor's in history from Rutgers, a master's from Duke and a law degree from the University of Michigan.

"I spent all my free time at night reading history books and I was excited about Ken Burns' Civil War documentary that came out around that time. So I called Skip to be a reference and he said, 'you should come out here and see what's happening at WRA.' Teaching seemed like something I would enjoy more than the legal work I was doing. The only thing I regret is that I didn't start earlier."

Bunting plans to retire at the end of the year after 15 years of service at WRA.

Because he was hired so close to the start of the school year Bunting didn't actually teach history his first year. "My first year I taught two sections of Public Speaking and one section of freshman English," he recalled with a laugh -- but that all changed quickly.

"When I first came here we offered only one AP history course in European history, but after a few years we added an AP U.S. History course, which has been terrific," Bunting said. "We also now have an AP Economics course, more topics classes and a Constitutional Law class which is rarely offered at the high school level." Bunting, the current holder of the Paul and Elinor Roundy Chair in History and Literature, said his legal background has served him well in the classroom.

"I did a fair amount of courtroom work while practicing law," Bunting said. "That gave me a sense of how important it is to relate to your audience -- be it a jury or a room full of students. Being able to deal with a degree of uncertainty and being organized are essential legal skills and that helps in a classroom setting. For example, in our Constitutional Law class I struggle between making the course challenging but not so complicated that the students are completely turned off. Finding that middle ground where you get your class to deal confidently with unfamiliar topics is important but elusive."

In addition to holding the Roundy Chair, Bunting also was the initial recipient of the John W. Hallowell Chair in Ethics and Philosophy. He is the faculty director of the student exchange program with the Caterham School in England and received the Bob Weiss Award for Outstanding Teacher in 2001.

"The Caterham program, now in its tenth year, has been a terrific experience," Bunting said. "My counterpart at Caterham, David Clark, and I talked over lunch one day in London about creating a program and we just started it up."

Bunting has also been the varsity softball coach for more than a decade, saying the team has "had more wins than losses in softball and we've had some good teams and a couple of league championships; it's been great fun for us."

Bunting said one of his best memories at Reserve was participating in the Ohio University History Writing Contest. The school had never competed in the competition until Bunting helped put together a team in 1998, taking David Haile '99, Tom Jackson '99 and Ryan Wirtz '99 to Athens for the competition. The team took top honors in the small-school division, while Jackson finished first in the individual portion out of 17,000 participants statewide. WRA teams would go on to win the competition several more times before Ohio University ended the competition.

"I have hugely good memories about the OU history contest; I'm very sad it has not been held for a few years now," Bunting said. "When we won the first year it was probably one of my most memorable moments here."

In addition to his work at Kaiser Engineers, where he supervised more than 60 professionals in the firm's environmental and transportation analysis practice, Bunting worked as a legal division director at the Environmental Protection Agency, supervising 30 lawyers and serving as chief prosecutor on cases involving unlawful disposal of hazardous wastes; as assistant general counsel for the President's Council on Olympic Sports, where he helped draft legislation that served as the basis for the federal Amateur Sports Act of 1978; and as a captain with the Marines, where he prosecuted more than 500 courts martial, served as a military judge in more than 100 special courts martial and was the prosecutor in the last U.S. Navy court martial in Vietnam.