Straight out of high school, Tom Carty enlisted in the U.S. Army. Today, the long-time principal of P.S/I.S. 49, a highly successful school in Middle Village, Queens, Tom laughs and says, “I guess I wasn’t very focused.”
From a typical Catholic Midwestern family, he remembers having a happy childhood in Columbus. He credits his father’s work ethic as a firefighter by day and a plumber in his off time and his mother’s as a public-school teacher for much of his success.
As a squad leader in the United States Infantry, Old Guard, at Fort Myer in Virginia, Tom was involved in ceremonial missions around the country and the world, including military funerals at Arlington and D Day ceremonies at Omaha Beach. “I escorted President Clinton to state dinners,” he recalls, “served at President Nixon’s funeral and was at the 50th anniversary of VE Day in Moscow in 1995.”
“I regret not having been deployed,” he adds.
After six years of active service, he joined the Army National Guard for three years. The benefits paid his tuition at Queens College after he moved to his wife Elizabeth’s hometown of Douglaston, Queens. They met while he was on active duty, and she was an elementary school teacher in D.C. Today, he says he has only good feelings about being in the military and wishes he had stayed in the National Guard longer. He has been chairman of the Little Neck/Douglaston Memorial Day parade since 2019.
“I got a lot more out of the service than it got out of me,” he says. “It gave me discipline, shaped my character and pointed me in the right direction. It helped make me the teacher I became.”
That didn’t happen right away. While at Queens College, he had dreams of becoming a sports journalist. His first assignment was to track down a sportswriter and interview him. After a number of false starts, New York Times sportswriter Jack Curry responded. Tom enjoyed the assignment but had decided he didn’t want to spend his life chasing people. He was taking a History of the Reformation course and had always liked kids, so he earned his teacher certification in 7-12 social studies.
As soon as he was certified, a job fell into his lap, teaching social studies at M.S. 172 in Floral Park, Queens. Though teaching was new, he went all in and over the next 6 years pitched in on English classes, became an assistant dean, graduation coordinator and girls’ and boys’ basketball coach. He says, “I had no administrative ambitions at all.”
But at that time C.W. Post College had a program that sent professors into the schools to cultivate new administrative talent. Tom finished his administrative certification at M.S. 172 in June of 2005 and was being courted for AP jobs by the beginning of July. He was named AP of Junior High School 162 in Bushwick, Brooklyn, in August.
Although J.H.S. 162 was completely out of his comfort zone, he learned to love it and stayed until 2014. The school was 99% Hispanic and generally consisted of families with high economic needs.
“It took about a year for the community to trust me,” he says. “Most of all, I liked working in a community that really needed people who were committed.”
When he was appointed principal of P.S./I.S. 49 in Middle Village, he found the relatively comfortable community to be set in its ways and he had to readjust all over again: “But now it’s like a second home,” he says.
“When I arrived, the school was very top down, so over the years I shifted a lot of responsibility to the staff,” he says, “and our retention rate is pretty high.”
“Most of all,” he adds, “I’m proud of the sense of community we’ve developed. It’s very important to me.”
What a challenge it was to maintain that community when the global pandemic struck in 2020: “We always said the Pledge of Allegiance in the morning, and the kids loved it. But when we were shut down, I had to figure out how to do it on YouTube and Instagram. I began doing the morning announcements live on social media and eventually added songs and read alouds. Kids tuned in from Ireland, Uzbekistan, Poland and other places they had gone.”
Even in the best of times Tom says principals have to pace themselves to avoid burnout. “Trust the people you’ve hired to do what needs to get done." Personally, he went so overboard in the beginning of his principalship that a union representative had to warn him to take a step back. Today, Tom is a very active member of AFSA, on the executive board for CSA, AFSA Local 1 and recently returned from AFSA’s triennial in Las Vegas.
“As a principal, you have to learn where to draw the line,” he warns, “You’re a counselor and mentor, a cop and an instructional leader. If you can’t delegate some of that to others, you probably can’t do the job.”
Today, with his oldest daughter Jaqueline back at the University of Dayton earning her Masters in ESL and his youngest Elizabeth just beginning at Penn State, he sometimes feels bereft and makes it a point to keep busy even in his off hours.
Most of all he loves to read historical fiction, non-fiction and traditional fiction. He practically inhales books, Flannery O’Connor’s short stories, Colson Whitehead’s novels, News of the World by Paulette Jiles, The Diamond Eye by Kate Quinn, a work of historical fiction about Lyudmila Pavlichenko, a Soviet history student and mother who became the deadliest female sniper in WWII. “A huge Bruce Springsteen fan,” he loved Warren Zane’s Deliver Me from Nowhere about the creation of Springsteen’s album “Nebraska”.
“And I like to exercise,” he says. “I bike, swim and run.” This is to say nothing of the triathlons he enters, once or twice a year. Now, although he left I.S. 162 12 years ago, he can’t get it completely out of his system and sometimes bicycles 15 miles from Douglaston to Bushwick just to check in.
