Peabody converges on City Hall Thursday and Friday to mourn the loss of School Superintendent Cara Murtagh and celebrate her life and the quarter-century contribution Murtagh made to local schools.
Even as they stand in line to pay their respects to Murtagh and attend her funeral Friday in Wiggin Auditorium, local residents and other mourners will also remember Veterans Memorial High School Vice Principal Judith Maniatis, who died on Sunday.
Maniatis worked for the public schools for 20 years, starting as a special education teacher and rising through the ranks to her Veterans Memorial job where she embraced Murtagh’s mantra of “Every student, every day.”
Cara Murtagh grew up steeped in a family dedicated to public education. She started her career at St. John’s School before teaching at the Carroll School. With strong tenure as an elementary school principal under her belt. She climbed to the rank of assistant superintendent and ascended to the school district’s top job in 2018.
Murtagh’s hiring as superintendent was a special event that ended a protracted time period when Peabody school officials interviewed, then rejected, superintendent candidates while relying on the capable and dedicated Interim Superintendent Herb Levine to steer the ship.
Murtagh brought an overdue energy and commitment to the job. She was confident enough in her skills and her knowledge of Peabody schools to admit that the 2018-2019 school year was a get-to-know-you period for her.
“I had a year under my belt to listen to people and to all stakeholders,” she told the Item in August.
Murtagh discussed her willingness to “agree to disagree” with people and repeated another set of words she lived by: “Conquer challenges and celebrate our success.”
She believed those words filtered down from her Lowell Street office to every Peabody school, including the high school at the other end of Lowell Street where Maniatis put the skills she honed in the schools and her dual master’s degrees in special education and school administration from Salem State to good use.
A city that so often comes together to share pride and joy gathers instead this week in sorrow and remembrance.
