Jay Matuk, Long Island HS teacher, principal from Miller Place, dies at 66

Miller Place’s Jay Matuk knew, as an educator, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. He also knew there is no one-size-fits-all approach to life.

"He was just so smart," marveled his wife, Judy Matuk. "I would ask, 'Jay, what's the weather out?' And it would be a 25-minute dissertation of the various clouds that were coming and the fronts that don't combine." Yet once, when on a planned train outing to Grand Central Terminal with their 6-year-old son, Zachary, deboarding after just two stops at the child’s behest, "He adapted beautifully, making up ‘The Land of Smithtown,’ ” where dollars had to be exchanged for the local currency.

As a principal, he had rapport with students and staff alike, said his friend Chris Homer, of Cold Spring Harbor, a retired teacher who had worked under him at that hamlet’s high school. "He would go to the custodians’ room and have lunch with them some days and you would just hear laughter," Homer recalled. "He spoke with everybody. He didn’t act superior. He was part of the team and wanted the team to succeed."

Even after retirement in 2017, "He helped so many new administrators" as a coach-mentor with the School Administrative Association of New York State, Judy Matuk said. "He gave them avenues and techniques to navigate really difficult [situations]. I mean, some of the [school] boards, the politics involved there — and he knew how to do it."

Jay Matuk died Jan. 3, two days shy of his 67th birthday, at Mather Hospital in Port Jefferson. The cause was complications of multiple myeloma, with which he was diagnosed in May 2022.

He was born Jan. 5, 1959, in Queens, the third child of Lithuanian immigrant and World War II Army veteran Sam Matuk and homemaker Marion Levine Matuk. After graduating from Jamaica High School in 1977, he spent a year at Queens College before transferring to SUNY Binghamton, where he earned a bachelor’s degree in history / political science.

He married Judy Frances Pickoff in 1984, and the following year received his master’s degree in education from the University of Illinois Chicago. After starting a family and briefly living in Falls Church, Virginia, he became a social studies teacher, first at West Hempstead High School and then Huntington High School.

After earning an education-administration professional degree from Queens College in 1991, he was named principal of Western Suffolk BOCES Regional Summer School and later director of South Huntington Alternative High School.

He became a vice principal at Long Beach High School in 1993 and later an assistant principal at Shoreham-Wading River High School. He progressed to principal at Connetquot High School, in Bohemia, in 1999, and at Patchogue-Medford High School from 2004 to 2006. He then served an 11-year-stint at Cold Spring Harbor High School.

At his various posts, Matuk initiated such efforts as Huntington High’s monthly Pride Award — given "not to the smartest but to the kid who was in the middle," Judy Matuk said, "but who was doing better and achieving more than previously thought" — and Cold Spring Harbor’s anti-bullying Challenge Day.

There were unpleasant duties as well, such as suspending 80 Patchogue-Medford High students for one to three days apiece for staging a walkout to protest budget cuts in 2006.

From 2009 until taking ill, Matuk additionally worked as an adjunct professor for educational administration at what is now LIU Post, in Brookville. There, in 2014, he was part of a partnership with a university in Cape Town, South Africa, that brought iPads to an impoverished township.

He volunteered for many organizations, among them the Long Island Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence, for which he was on the board of directors from 2012-17; as accreditation team chair of the Middle States Association Commissions on Elementary and Secondary Schools, from 2000-04; and Mount Sinai’s Temple Beth Emeth, serving as chief financial officer starting in 2019, and pitching on its softball team.

He devoured nonfiction books and was a lifelong "Star Trek" fan. At a Binghamton movie theater in 1980, he and another student auctioned a "Star Trek: The Motion Picture" lobby display for charity.

In addition to his wife, Matuk is survived by his daughters, Katie Matuk Maccarone, of Sound Beach, and Paige Matuk, of Mount Sinai; son, Zachary Matuk, of Patchogue; sister, Carol Matuk Bedell, of Coram; brother, Leslie Matuk, of Plainview; and four grandchildren.

Visitation was Tuesday at O.B. Davis Funeral Homes in Miller Place. Shiva was held at his home on Wednesday and Thursday.

Donations may be made to either the Multiple Myeloma Research Foundation or Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center.