Quantcast

Looking for Mineola’s mayor? You’ll find him at the high school, for now

IMG_1795
Pereira with a group of students on a field trip.
Photo provided by Paul Pereira

Mineola high schoolers can probably say they know their mayor better than most students for one simple reason: He’s their teacher.

Mineola Mayor Paul Pereira has been educating the village’s teenagers on history and government for the past 33 years at the same high school he graduated from in 1989.

“I have a unique set of circumstances that enable me to really bring that real world into the classroom of government,” Pereira said. “I think that it gives me a unique perspective as a government teacher to be able to speak about government firsthand and give real-life examples.”

Pereira said he’s given presentations to elementary classes on what a mayor does and has brought in elected officials like the state’s lieutenant governor and comptroller, state Sen. Jack Martins, Town of North Hempstead Supervisor Jen DeSena, local mayors and state Assembly members to speak in his high school classes.

Despite this Pereira said he takes separating his roles as mayor and teacher seriously, though he does believe his dual role has helped the public schools and local government have a positive relationship.

“I really go to great lengths to try to keep the two things separate,” Pereira said. “I try not to bring my mayor hat into the school and my school hat into the village hall, but there are times when it’s unavoidable.” 

He admits “it is challenging if the students, parents or community members or colleagues, say, usually jokingly, ‘Hey, when are you gonna fix those potholes or hey, you didn’t plow the streets the right way,’” he added. “But for the most part, the kids are great. They know not to cross those lines, and I try not to cross them myself.”

Politics was something Pereira came into “by accident” in 2008 after encouragement from friend and former Mayor Jack Martins. That’s quite different from how he came into his passion for teaching and studying history, a path he’s been firmly on since his senior year at Mineola High School.

“My inspiration to become a teacher was my senior year AP European history teacher, Dr. Ben Rappa,” Pereira said. “He was a Ph.D in history, and I was so impressed with how much he knew and how passionate he was about history, I really fell in love with history because of that class.”

After graduating from Mineola he took four short years away to obtain a history degree from Adelphi University before Rappa brought him back to his alma mater’s halls, hiring him to teach alongside him. 

“The person who inspired me to become a teacher gave me my first teaching job,” Pereira said. “Looking back, I was really young. I was 22 and some of the kids in the hallway were 18…It’s weird to think that at that age I was teaching, but I didn’t know any better. I worked really, really hard.”

He hasn’t left Mineola’s halls since, continuing to teach classes on history, current events and government full time while earning a master’s in history from Queens College, taking classes and working on his 110-page thesis, entitled “A Marriage of Convenience” on the English-Portuguese Alliance from 1640 to 1662, at odd hours.

“It was a lot of sleepless, stressful, long nights looking back,” Pereira said. 

Pereira said his love of history and relationships with his students have kept him in the profession for so long. 

“I’ve always been somebody who was passionate about civics and history and current events and staying up with news and with events,” Pereira said. “Growing up in the ‘80s, it certainly was an amazing time to be alive. You had the Cold War, the Berlin Wall coming down, the end of communism, the end of apartheid, the European Union coming into its own.”

“I fell in love with history first and with teaching second,” he continued. “I really enjoyed the relationship that I developed with the kids. I connected with them, maybe because I was so young at the time.”

He said he frequently believed the connections he built with his students were more valuable than the history lessons he taught.

“That stuff, they’re going to forget,” Periera said. “What they’re going to remember is were you there for them? Were you kind? Did you listen? Did you empathize? I hope that what students take out of the time that they had with me is humanity, compassion, understanding and the importance of participating actively in our society and our community.”

And his relationships with his students don’t end when they receive their diplomas, Pereira said.

“I just attended a wedding of a former student of mine who graduated 16 years ago,” he said. “There I saw dozens and dozens of his classmates, my former students, dating back to the late ‘90s, and just to see them, and see them hug you and talk about you…Seeing that you had an impact on them, that you made an impression, hearing about students who have gone on to go into education, some of them into social studies education, you hope that you’ve played some role in that.”

His commitment to his students is what helped him find success when Superintendent Michael Nagler tapped him to serve as the director of the MAPS, or alternative school program, in 2015. The program was designed to support struggling students with credit recovery and ensure attendance. 

“We had fewer than a dozen students, so you could really give them attention. If a student didn’t show up on the bus or didn’t show up to school, I would call them. I’d go to their house,” Pereira said. “We really had a great success rate of graduating…When I run into some of those students who are now in their mid-20s or late 20s, they are so thankful.”

“Many of these students didn’t have the best home lives, didn’t have a lot of support,” he continued. “There was nobody to get them out of bed, there was nobody to push them. There may have been a language barrier. Maybe some of them had interrupted education, or they had been moving from school district to school district, so it was tough for them to kind of put down roots. The program was super successful in supporting them.”

Pereira taught in the program and served as the director, which he cited as one of his proudest career accomplishments, until it folded in 2021.

He’s also brought his Portuguese heritage to the district, helping to make it the only one in the state to offer Portuguese language classes, something else he’s proud of.

“Although I’m not a language teacher, I have volunteered to teach Portuguese…[for] the national examination of world languages,” said Pereira, a Portuguese immigrant whose family moved to Mineola from Estarejja when he was 6. “It’s something that I’m proud of and happy to be able to do.”

IMG 4415
A group of Pereira’s students surprised him by attending his citizenship ceremony on Feb. 14, 1995.

However, after over three decades as an educator, Pereira said he thinks it’s nearing time to retire from the profession. 

“This likely will be my last year teaching,” Pereira said. “I couldn’t have picked a better profession, a more rewarding profession. It is one that obviously I will always cherish and look back fondly upon…But, I think 33 years of doing one thing is good enough.”

“I don’t know what my second act will be; I have not decided that yet,” he continued. “I’m not afraid of working. I’ve been working non-stop since I was 14. So, I’ll find something else to do.”

He has the resume to prove it. Pereira said he worked three jobs through college: data entry for a window company, behind a deli counter and at a clothing store. He also taught youth sports, primarily soccer and wrestling, while earning his master’s and teaching full-time. 

There was a time, he said, he considered leaving the profession earlier in his career to become a lawyer for a better salary as he paid off his student loans over the course of 18 years.

“At one point, I contemplated going to law school. I took the LSAT because I thought that would be a better way to pay back my student loans; lawyers made more money than teachers,” Pereira said.

“But I said, ‘I don’t want to be a lawyer. I want to be a teacher,’” he continued. “I’m glad that I chose that path. This is where I was meant to be.”