COURTESY PHOTO
Pictured is former educator and principal, Vic Tseki.
Vic Tseki died Tuesday at the age of 88 leaving behind loved ones, friends and the colleagues who remember him as a Lynn educator and former Shoemaker School and Tracy School principal.
Tseki loved sports, especially Boston College football. He also loved kids and he was a principal from a simpler, maybe gentler, era in local and national education. During his tenure as Shoemaker principal 30 years ago, Tseki’s colleagues included Ed Turmenne, who was Harrington’s and later Callahan School’s principal, and Ed Ray, who was Ingalls School principal.
Future school superintendents James Leonard and James Mazareas were principals at the Washington and Sisson schools, respectively, and future School Committee member Vin Spirito was at Hood.
Lynn public schools 30 years ago were poised between education traditions and styles that had endured for decades and the dawn of an academic era marked by student testing and a menu of specialized services for students.
School desegregation occupied educators’ attention but school bullying, opioid addiction and transgender identification were subjects framed in a much different context than they are today.
Tseki, like former colleagues Claire Crane and Helen Mihos, thrilled in the opportunity to watch children swarm into their schools at the end of every summer and emerge from the classroom nine months later as students who discovered the joy of reading or the recognition that mathematics is not as hard as it first appeared.
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Principals, like teachers, are challenged to see the individual student even as they educate classrooms-full and schools-full of students every day. Vic Tseki, like many of his fellow principals, had that acquired ability to drop into a crouch and talk to a kid on a kid’s level.
Principals in a funny way are extended fathers and mothers to kids who love their parents, who don’t have parents or who consider school a few-hours-a-day refuge from a tough home life.
The Vic Tsekis, Ed Turmennes and Jim Leonards could impart the toughness of a parent and communicate a parent’s love to kids who needed a dose of love along with learning.
His obituary cited Tseki’s love of reading, walking the beach and enjoying a beer. But he was also a man who loved the rhythm of education — the slap of books on a desk, the clatter of school bells followed by laughter and shouting.
Tseki understood that elementary school education is really a footnote in time when it is measured against someone’s life. But he also realized children acquire priceless gifts in an elementary school classroom, including a lifetime love of reading, the joy of play and laughter and the knowledge that the adult they most admire could be them one day.
