Maryknoll School president Mike Baker will leave for New England at the end of this school year with air-conditioning in every classroom, a new, two-story community center under construction and a stronger curriculum and alumni association as his legacy.

"His leadership qualities really took Maryknoll School to a different level," said Al Wong, chairman of Maryknoll's board of directors. "I hate to see him go. He leaves huge footprints. It's going to be difficult to follow him."

Baker's successor will be named later.

Baker, 68, arrived in Hawai'i in May 1997 as Maryknoll's first president. Until Baker, the separate grade school and high school campuses had their own principals, with the parish priest administering the school.

Baker came with a background as a teacher and headmaster but quickly found himself immersed in fundraising.

"Before Mike Baker, our biggest project was $500,000," Wong said. "Now we've spent over $13 million without debt and reinforced our buildings and added extensive air-conditioning."

Baker liked the academic programs he found at Maryknoll but the high school campus, in particular, "was dirty. It was hot, perhaps not even healthy."

He was hired by the board to raise Maryknoll's profile in the community, which Wong said Baker accomplished.

But facilities and fundraising soon shot to the top of Baker's to-do list.

"The programs are outstanding," he said, "but the facilities just did not support those programs. Improving facilities became our focus so the students would have a better chance to enhance their education."

Ground-breaking began in November on a 35,000-square-foot community center at an estimated cost of $19 million. The school has raised $9 million toward a $12 million long-term capital campaign.

The Maryknoll School Community Center will be large enough to hold all 1,395 students in the same building for the first time in the school's history.

It will include underground parking for 85 vehicles and an NBA-regulation basketball court that can be converted to two high school courts or three volleyball courts.

"We've never played a home game in the 80-year history of the school," Baker said. "We have our homecoming at somebody's else's campus. This will enable us to bring our entire school together for the first time."

Pressed to list the accomplishments he's most proud of, Baker also said he supported expanding the "coalition of essential school program" that was in its infancy when he arrived.

"The students become the center of their own learning," he said. "Unlike most forms of education, which suggest you open up the skull and fill it up with information, this assumes that each student brings all kinds of gifts to the school. You can learn mathematics on a piano as well as you can at a chalkboard."

Students take only three classes per day, but they last two hours.

"In language class, it may be the only thing they study that day," Baker said. "They may go down to Waikiki and converse with tourists in Japanese. Each language has an exchange program and students go to Japan for weeks."

Baker and his wife, Janice, will return to the Boston area, where Baker — a devout Red Sox fan — hopes to live "no more than 90 minutes from Fenway Park."

After 46 years as an educator, he said it is time for "retirement," although he still plans to teach part-time, perhaps at the University of New Hampshire.

But he also will be back at Maryknoll in April 2009 to see the Maryknoll School Community Center open.

"We're really going to miss the Islands," he said. "I love the food, the music, the culture and — most of all — the people. I never have made friends with winter, period."