Jack Perna doesn’t have any children of his own, but at the Montauk School, where he has worked since February of 1973, he has helped guide thousands of students through their formative years.
The longtime superintendent and principal of the school, Mr. Perna has announced he is retiring in June this year after more than 50 years as an educator, and a search for his successor is under way.
From behind the organized chaos of his desk at the school, he snapped his fingers. Fifty years “went like this,” he said. “For me, it was wonderful. I’ve seen so many of my kids grow up and become successful adults. . . . My first class is reaching 60 years old. I don’t know how that happened.”
Time flies when you’re having fun, and sometimes also when you’re not having fun, like during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic and whenever tragedies like school shootings make national headlines.
“I’m always afraid of that. Our guards are armed,” Mr. Perna said, referring to the school’s security team, “but Covid was the biggest challenge. That day that they canceled the professional basketball game, I thought, ‘This must be bigger than we were thinking,’ and the next day we were told to stay home.”
He himself grew up in Montauk after his family moved here from the Bronx. He attended the St. Therese of Lisieux Catholic School for several years and later graduated from East Hampton High School. He would work in the summers at Pizza Village, which was owned by his aunt and uncle, and in the winters at Gurney’s, which was where Bob Fisher met him at a Lions Club event. Mr. Fisher, the Montauk School principal, invited Mr. Perna to work there; all these years later, a photo of him still hangs in Mr. Perna’s office.
Before he became superintendent and principal in 1995, Mr. Perna was a classroom teacher, guidance counselor, assistant principal, and, sometimes, a bookkeeper. Outside of school, he also taught the confirmation classes at St. Therese, stopping only during the pandemic.
Over the years, he helped usher in the prekindergarten program, the school’s popular Enrichment for All program, and, more recently, Spanish lessons for every grade. He oversaw the construction of a new classroom wing in 2000. Having “never called in sick,” he said, he has amassed a whopping 583 sick days. He hired all but two of the school’s current employees.
“My ‘aha moment’ was walking in the first day” to the fourth-grade classroom where he’d been hired as a leave replacement. “I just knew this was going to be good,” he said.
Mr. Perna, 72, is thought to be the second-longest serving superintendent on Long Island. He started in the role shortly after Hank Grishman of Nassau County’s Jericho School District, who has been superintendent there since 1995 and has a contract that runs through July 2025. (Mr. Grishman’s tenure apparently beats out Mr. Perna’s by less than a year.) But Mr. Grishman has never been asked to serve as grand marshal of the Montauk Friends of Erin St. Patrick’s Day Parade, which Mr. Perna did in 2013.
Mr. Perna could have retired 17 years ago, but, he said, “I loved it, and I still do, but it’s time. I think it’s time to find somebody younger and more energetic.”
Just then, three cheerful kindergartners bounced into Mr. Perna’s office offering up homemade strawberry-flavored cupcakes left over from a classroom birthday party. He graciously accepted one and posed for a picture. After they left, he smiled and said, “It happens all day long. My door is always open. Kids come first, especially if they have a cupcake.”
He also reflected on the spirit of childhood over the decades.
“Kids are kids. I don’t think there’s all that much difference” between then and now, he said. “Actually, I remember back in the late 1970s, when I first became the assistant principal, I believe the seventh and eighth graders were tougher to deal with than they are now.”
He later continued, “I believe our kids are more naive. There’s no smoking or pot here, but back then, we had some of that problem. But the other answer is I’m also older. I was young, and probably too young, to be dealing with seventh and eighth graders who were just a few years apart from me. Now I’m old enough to be their grandfather.”
“There’s that innocence, still,” he mused.
He has the uniform respect of his fellow superintendents here. “When I came to East Hampton 13 years ago, Jack greeted me with a level of positivity that is unique to the East End of Long Island,” said Adam Fine, his counterpart in the East Hampton School District. “It is without question that Jack’s influence on his students at East Hampton High School was incredibly unique. Never did he ever hesitate to make something happen for his kids! His guidance and mentorship will be with me for the rest of my career.”
Mr. Fine said he’ll miss Mr. Perna’s “quick wit and sense of humor.” He remembers the day Mr. Perna called a snow day when it was 75 degrees and sunny.
“Jack would always say the weather patterns are very different in Montauk,” Mr. Fine said. “As much as we would joke about this, the bottom line was that Jack was making decisions based on the welfare of his students and staff, and nobody can question that type of decision-making. I will miss Jack at the helm of the Montauk School.”
Diane Hausman, who is in her 28th year on the Montauk School Board, said, “I don’t know if there’s enough words to sum up what he’s done. He’s always — always — had his heart with the kids. Every decision he made was what’s best for the students . . . and his door was always open. It amazed me how many times you’d see kids sitting in the office eating their lunch or kids who needed to talk to him.”
Lately Ms. Hausman has spoken with many Montauk School alumni. “I’m talking 40-year-olds,” she said, “and the first thing out of their mouth is ‘Mr. Perna, Mr. Perna.’ The impact is indescribable.”
Except for the brief time in his youth when he considered becoming a Dominican priest, Mr. Perna said, he always wanted to become a teacher.
“Mission accomplished,” he said.
The district received 30 applications for the Montauk superintendent post and interviewed 10 of them. Ms. Hausman said the school board is conducting the search itself, as opposed to hiring an outside firm or the Eastern Suffolk Board of Cooperative Educational Services to find the next chief school administrator. Many of the applicants are local, she said.
The new superintendent will be selected in the spring, Ms. Hausman said, following a round of screenings by a committee that includes students, parents, faculty, community members, volunteers from the Montauk Historical Society, Concerned Citizens of Montauk, the Montauk Fire Department, and others. “We are pleased. I think we have some strong candidates.”
Mr. Perna, who plans to split his time in retirement between Montauk and Florida, said he will miss the school and everyone involved in it. He has chosen not to be heavily involved in the search for a new superintendent.
“I want them to immediately forget me and be loyal” to the new person, Mr. Perna said. “I just want them to remember me as someone who cared. That’s good enough for me.”