Maggie Kinane, Comsewogue High School social studies teacher, dies at 61

Maggie Kinane, who taught social studies to thousands of Comsewogue High School students over a two-decade career, died July 30 at South Shore University Hospital in Bay Shore. She was 61. The cause was a coronary ailment, said her husband, Michael Kinane.

Kinane started her career working for travel companies including Gogo and 206 Tours, a Hauppauge company that organizes Catholic pilgrimages. By the early 2000s, when the travel business began shedding jobs and she turned to teaching, she had traveled to nearly every country in Europe and many in the rest of the world. "She had such a wealth of knowledge, and she wanted to pass it on to other people," said Michael Kinane, a retired carpenter. The couple lived in Bay Shore.

After earning her teaching certificate from Dowling College, she joined the staff of Comsewogue High School as a social studies teacher in 2002, focusing on global studies, economics and psychology. A Kinane class was not like other classes, said Jeanne Merone, who taught English across the hall. It started with desk arrangement: "She had the students face each other to promote conversation so they’d be talking and looking at each other. And she had a whiteboard, and even though she was teaching social studies, for any time period, she always had today’s headline, whatever it was, up there. It was something [students] should know that happened today and they’d relate it to whatever they were doing."

The juniors and seniors who took Kinane’s psychology elective built models of the human brain. Fridays were experiment days, when a handful of Kinane’s students — temporarily banished from her classroom because they were the control group in a test — might wait for a while with Merone. "Everything was brought to life," Merone said. "She made up these scenarios that [the students] seemed to enjoy."

At lunch during school days, Merone recalled, Kinane was the driving force behind an informal group of teachers who met for debate and discussion. Merone said the group’s members called themselves "the ladies of ‘The View,’ " a nod to the television talk show that often takes on current events. The group did as well, along with weighty issues like home schooling and abortion.

Matt Drucker, an Italian teacher at the school who carpooled with Kinane for years, said that sometimes, after an especially trying day, they’d stop for a treat in Islip at Coyle’s ice cream shop. "You’d say, ‘I think today’s an ice cream day,’ and we’d just sit there for two hours," he recalled. "She wasn’t just a good friend. She was almost an older sister, somebody who’d give the best advice."

Kinane grew up in the north Bronx and attended Saint Barnabas High School, the Catholic girls school in Woodlawn Heights, graduating in 1981. (The school closed in 2024.) She graduated from Manhattan College in 1985.

Comsewogue principal Michael Mosca said Kinane was a "stalwart" in the school’s social studies department, but an unusual one: "She always tried to reinvent," he said. "She wanted to improve every year. I’d observe her classroom and she’d say, 'I want to try something new,'" whether that meant incorporating new technologies in her classroom or different teaching strategies.

In addition to her husband, Kinane is survived by a sister, Sarah Canaan, of Bay Shore, and brothers Andy Harman, of Bay Shore, and Michael Harman, of Deer Park.

Visitation  took place Thursday and Friday at Fredrick J. Chapey & Sons Funeral Home  in East Islip. A funeral service was held there Friday at 1 p.m., followed by private cremation.

By Nicholas Spangler

nicholas.spangler@newsday.comspanglernewsday

Nicholas Spangler is a general assignment reporter and has worked at Newsday since 2010.