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Kim Burningham stood on the floor of the Utah House during a debate about education funding in the 1980s and proudly acknowledged being a nerd.

"When I was a kid, my peers would fantasize about being baseball players or basketball players," he said. "But I would sit in my bedroom with props representing students and pretend to be a schoolteacher."

He fulfilled that dream, spending 27 years as one of Bountiful High School's most beloved teachers as speech and debate coach and school play director.

Burningham, who died Friday at age 80 from liver cancer, eventually moved from the classroom to the political stage, where he continued to champion public education — including as a fierce, but always soft-spoken, opponent of school vouchers. He also tirelessly promoted reforms to improve ethics and accountability standards in public office, usually against a strong political head wind.

Burningham spent 15 years in the House, representing Bountiful, and another 16 years on the Utah Board of Education, seven years as chairman.

"Kim was such a popular teacher at Bountiful High that many of his students who had graduated, began careers and started families moved back into the Bountiful High area so their children could experience him as a teacher as well," said attorney and community activist David Irvine, a former student of Burningham.

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Reluctant politician • Irvine, as a Republican member of the Utah House, recruited Burningham to seek appointment to his seat when he resigned after being appointed to the Utah Public Service Commission.

"At first he declined," Irvine said. "He hadn't wanted to be in politics. But he thought about it and decided he could do some good."

After joining the Legislature in 1979, Burningham was a strong voice for public education, taking positions that became increasingly challenging as the Legislature trended more conservative in areas like education funding and became more critical of traditional education models.

"I consider him as brave as anyone I've ever dealt with," said former House Speaker Nolan Karras, who served several years with Burningham in the House.

"He stood up for what he believed in right from the start. He was the principled kind of a guy you could disagree with and still love."

Karras said Burningham would never waver from a cause, no matter the political pressure.

"You always knew where he was coming from and why. If he were in the Legislature today, he would still stand by his core principles, and it would be much tougher now, in this polarized world where things have gotten so much more bitter and more partisan."

A graduate of the University of Utah, Burningham never stopped pursuing his own educational advancements. During his teaching career, he received a master of fine arts from the University of Arizona and a master of professional writing from the University of Southern California.

He wrote and produced several plays at Bountiful High and performed in plays locally, including at Pioneer Memorial Theatre.

But with all his accomplishments and displays of political courage, Burningham always had an aura of innocence.

He would tell the story about going on a Mormon mission to Mississippi in 1955. As he got off the bus in Oxford, he saw a sign over a drinking fountain that said, "Colored Only."

"Why in the world would they have colored water in the drinking fountains," he thought to himself.

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Loyal Republican • Burningham always described himself as a loyal Republican, although as the GOP majority in the Legislature veered more and more to the right, he often found himself at odds with his party comrades.

After he resigned from the Legislature to become director of the Utah Statehood Centennial Commission, he was elected to the state school board, representing the Bountiful area, where he would serve for the next 15 years and put himself more in the crosshairs of the Republican right wing.

When the Legislature in 2007 passed the voucher law that provided tax credits for private school tuition, Burningham was one of that law's most vocal opponents. He and other members of the school board supported a ballot initiative that led to the law being repealed.

Those school board members then became targets, and several incumbents were denied a position on the ballot by a handpicked selection committee charged with vetting the candidates and sending three names to the governor, who then would pick two of those names to vie in the general election.

When Burningham was up for re-election, there was a push to leave him off the list to be sent to the governor, but such a groundswell of support for him emerged, he made it to the ballot and easily won re-election.

"He was beloved because he would never cave to leadership if it meant going against his core values," said Sheryl Allen, another former Bountiful High student of Burningham who took his House seat when he resigned in 1994.

"Every time he ran for something, his former students would rally to give him support and help," she said.

"During the committee review process to pick candidates for the ballot, the committee was slanted. It was stacked to select conservative charter school-backed candidates. But the governor's office was inundated with letters supporting him."

After his service on the school board, which included spending a year as president of the National Association of State Boards of Education, he remained committed as a community activist and a thorn in the side of some legislators.

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Ethics advocate • He was a member of the Utahns for Ethical Government coalition that worked to get an initiative on the ballot that would have created an ethics commission to evaluate complaints against public officials.

That initiative drive ran into heavy opposition from legislators and lobbyists and failed to get enough signatures to qualify for the ballot.

While accepting the Making Democracy Work award from the League of Women Voters of Salt Lake in 2012, he told the audience what it would take for him to finally retire from public activism.

He could happily fade away, he said, when legislative caucuses are finally open to the public, campaign donations are limited, legislators stop using campaign donations to buy leadership positions by contributing to other legislators, lobbyists are no longer serving as legislators, and vice versa, an ethics initiative is finally passed, Utah rises out of last place in the nation for education funding, the caucus/convention system is amended or eliminated so that candidates for public office can be elected through a direct primary and political parties in Utah are balanced.

He never did retire from public advocacy because most of those goals have not been met.

He co-wrote op-ed pieces advocating for more education funding and churned out a popular blog for several years that promoted policies to ensure ethical standards in government and support for public education.

His last blog, written just a few days before his death and while he was under hospice care, was co-written by Rep. Ray Ward, R-Bountiful, and urged fellow Republicans to vote for the more moderate candidate in the congressional special election to replace Jason Chaffetz and reject the candidate chosen by the convention delegates.

Burningham is survived by his wife, Susan, two children and eight grandchildren.