As one of Rob Cronk’s first students at Wiscasset High School in the early 1980s, Carl Urquhart found the industrial arts teacher didn’t show the students how to do something. He got them to figure it out.

Urquhart also noticed Cronk was excited about teaching. “It made it fun to go to class every day.”

He later helped Cronk and wife Karen Cronk build their Southport home. The Alna man is a Central Maine Power lineman now and has stayed friends with his former teacher.

Rob Cronk, 65 and just off his 34th year at the school, cited those positive connections with students as one of the highlights. He’s retiring now and will miss the students and staff, he said Friday. The Wiscasset School Committee was set to take up his resignation July 28.

He gets invited to class reunions and stays in touch with past students including Urquhart and one student who, at Cronk’s encouragement, asked for and got a flight simulator for the school. He’s now a Southwest Airlines pilot, Cronk said.

Over the decades, Cronk logged an estimated 230,000 miles on his Southport-Wiscasset commute. “I always liked the drive.” He could think of the day ahead and then debrief himself on it in the afternoon.

Karen Cronk’s commute was shorter. At 63, she is retiring from the Boothbay schools after 33 years teaching there, first in English, then special education.

The Cronks met when both attended Fitchburg (Massachusetts) State College. They taught in and outside Maine before landing their longtime Boothbay and Wiscasset jobs.

Rob Cronk attributes his longevity and past teaching and program honors to his introducing new ideas and methods as the technology has changed, and working multiple disciplines into a unit, such as geography and art into an America’s Cup project. The unit spread to schools in several states.

The Cronks reflected on their careers during a joint interview in a classroom with a drafting-themed wall design Rob Cronk’s students helped create.

He’s leaving the job at least a couple of years sooner than he thought he would.

The Cronks said education as an industry has changed in ways that make it harder for teachers to serve students; and in Rob Cronk’s case, changes he cited to the space where his program is housed led to the decision to leave. He said he questioned the changes, but was unsuccessful in efforts to keep the current setup. He tried, “for the good of the students,” he said.

He has offered to give suggestions to the next technology teacher. But he doesn’t know how some portions of the units he developed could be carried out in light of the changes, he said.

Responding to questions, administrators said room changes are being made to best serve students. Superintendent of Schools Heather Wilmot and WMHS Principal Peg Armstrong both praised Cronk as a valued educator. “He provided valuable hands-on learning experiences for students for many years and it will be hard to replace him,” Armstrong writes in an email. “I wish him the best in his retirement ... I hope we will be able to hire a teacher with a similar skill set who takes the same level of pride in his or her program.”

In Wilmot’s interview and in Armstrong’s emails Friday and Monday, the two spoke about the program’s future. “We fully support the technology education program for our kids,” Wilmot said. “We are looking at adjusting it to include more STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math),” better prepare students  and provide a more integrated approach to math instruction, she said.

Armstrong described the changes in what will go where, and why. “WMHS is continuing to consolidate and make necessary adjustments to the use of classroom space to address needs that resulted from the addition of the 7th and 8th grades. That is why it was necessary to move the drafting tables into the larger Tech Ed classroom. The computer lab has moved into room 106, where the drafting tables were ... This allowed us to use that larger space for 7th grade English Language Arts (ELA).  Now, we have three adjoining classrooms in that wing, two larger rooms for the 7th and 8th grade ELA classes separated by a small room for the Jobs for Maine's Graduates (JMG) program.”

The result is better programming for the middle school students, Armstrong adds.

Like her husband of 37 years, Karen Cronk, 63, said she will miss her students and colleagues. One student told her she wasn’t old enough to retire. “I didn’t disagree.” Some asked if she would stay until they graduated; but by then there would be new students she would also want to see through graduation, she said.

Cronk has told the students she’ll see them at graduation. The school’s tradition of the Grand March is a special moment for her, to see the students and see their parents who were also once her students, she said.

She said that in special education in recent years, students are coming in with greater emotional and behavioral needs and that it may be nearing the point where school districts will need mental health specialists to address the needs teachers cannot.

Teachers do many, many jobs, but mental health practitioner is not one of them, she said. In addition, throughout education these days, new products keep coming along to adapt to that are really the same basic tenets of teaching and testing, repackaged, she said. “These are things that are second nature. I think veteran teachers are kind of offended.”

Rob Cronk has not applied to teach anywhere else and doesn’t know if he will.

“As I look at this new open door, I realize I don’t have to be back here in late August,” he said. The couple look forward to having the time to travel with friends. Karen Cronk hopes to get to projects around the house and volunteer at Southport’s United Methodist Church and elsewhere. She’d like to help people who need rides to appointments.

The couple also expect to be helping their daughter, Boothbay Region High School graduate Caitlin Shepherd, and husband Adam Shepherd build a home on land the Shepherds recently bought near her parents’ home.

Like her parents, Caitlin Shepherd has gone into education. She taught in Massachusetts for five years and has just taken an educational technician job at BRHS, her mother said.