Charity Robey

Shelter Island School Senior Abby Kotula is a quiet leader.

Abby Kotula is the vice president of the Shelter Island Class of 2020. (Credit: Charity Robey)

ABBY KOTULA IS vice president of the Shelter Island Class of 2020, a multi-sport athlete, and although she doesn’t consider herself a great cook, when it’s time for macaroni and cheese, her considerable project management skills guarantee a speedy and excellent result. 

“You have to put in your own cheese,” Abby said. “I start with Kraft, it’s the best, despite what people say about Annie’s. And I use a blend of cheeses.” 

From cross country running to volleyball, cheerleading, basketball, softball and baseball, Abby has been a spirited participant in high school sports, if not a star. “Some people are great at one sport and they play it every day,” she said. “I’m not great at one single sport and that’s why I’ve done so many.” 

In ninth grade she was the lone female player on the JV baseball team, a left-handed pitcher on a team of guys, most of whom she’d known for years. 

Born in 2001, Abby grew up in a house on Bowditch Road with her brother Michael, who is six years younger. Her dad, Ed Kotula, is a captain on the South Ferry, and her mom Vicky is a children’s librarian in Greenport.

There were 22 students in Abby’s kindergarten class at the Shelter Island School, and the 12 set to graduate this year have been together for almost 13 of their 17 years. “It’s been quite the journey,” she said. “It’s been a little difficult for people from the outside to come into such a closed environment.”

With graduation in sight, Abby’s been thinking a lot about the freedoms and the limitations of growing up on a remote island and attending a small school. “Everyone knows everything about everyone,” she said. “I don’t care, because I like me.” 

She said she’d attended homecoming at a couple of much larger high schools, and got a glimpse of what she missed. “I had tears in my eyes at one of them,” she remembered. “They have a football team, and there is a big game. With that said, I don’t have any regrets growing up here. I have made my best friends here and we won’t drift apart.”

For four summers, Abby’s worked at the Pridwin, busing tables, serving at weddings and the barbecue. She’s sorry she can’t go back this summer, but renovations will force the Pridwin to stay closed for the season, and force her to find another job. 

An eager participant in school trips, Abby said the high school journey that math teacher James Theinert led to the Glacier, Grand Teton, and Yellowstone National Parks was unforgettable. 

“I got to stand next to some of my closest friends and look out at amazing views,” she said, and gave a shout-out to the generosity of local businesses and the Shelter Island Educational Foundation for making these trips possible.

Another trip led by Mr. Theinert to the Strongpoint Theinert Ranch brought Abby and her classmates to the mountains of Magdalena, New Mexico, where they built a campsite as a service project, and hiked with veterans working through the difficult adjustment to civilian life that is so common in those who see combat. 

“They told their life stories,” she said. “I remember everything they said.”

Abby’s participation in the Rotarians Youth Leadership Association, (RYLA) beginning last spring, has been life-changing. She and her classmate, Emma Gallagher, were inspired by the example of Islander Luke Gilpin, who graduated in 2018, attends George Washington University, and is a senior leader with RYLA. 

In RYLA, Abby found an organization that seeks to develop leadership in young people who are not necessarily outgoing, public-speaking people, but would like to be “quiet leaders” in their peer groups.

A spring RYLA program in April of 2018, followed by a summer program in Massachusetts, were enough to convince Abby that the Rotary organization was for her. Organizing and coordinating the multiple fundraisers and service events that RYLA sponsors tapped into her strengths, and introduced her to students from all over the Northeast. 

“I was very quiet before RYLA, and since quiet leaders are often passed over, RYLA tries to get everyone involved,” she said, adding that she made her way through a competitive selection process to become a senior leader with RYLA. 

In the fall, Abby will study at Southern New Hampshire University (SNHU), and plans to work in hospitality and event planning after graduation. She’s particularly interested in environmental issues in hospitality management, an interest that was piqued when she was a prospective student attending a class at SNHU. She asked a question about hotels going green, and discovered this question is an important challenge in hotel management and other hospitality disciplines. 

She was inspired her to write her senior thesis about the problem of pollution in cruise lines. Her research showed her evidence of cruise ships the size of small towns, that dump plastics and food waste in the ocean, use dirty fuels, and generate more pollution than a town on land. One of her dreams is to figure out how to make a more sustainable model for this industry, and go on a cruise herself one day.

Contemplating the future of Shelter Island, she worries that the movement toward a tourist economy will continue, and the school will disappear altogether. “Every year the classes get smaller,” she noted. 

When Abby started kindergarten, the overall school population was around 250. Today it’s under 200.

She’s aware of a few senior classmates who intend to come back to Shelter Island after college, but she isn’t one of them. “I want to travel, to find out about other cultures, and you can’t find any of that here,” she said. “And it’s very expensive.” 

No matter where she lives, she said she’ll stay close with the steady and reliable friends she’s made here. “There are two types of friends when you are in a situation,” she said, describing her best friends. “The kind who will freak out with you, and be there for you in that way, and the kind who will stay calm and help you through.” 

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Lightning Round — Abby Kotula

What do you always have with you? On a memory shelf in my room I have the ticket I used to go from Tarifa in Spain to Africa on a ferry.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The school. I’ve had the most fun memories there.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? The RYLA summer camp at Norwich Lake, in Massachusetts.

When was the last time you were elated? When I found out I made Senior Leader in RYLA, the happiest moment of my life. 

What exasperates you? When people try to be someone who they are not.

What is the best day of the year on Shelter Island? The day of the fireworks. 

Favorite food? Mint chocolate chip ice cream

Peter Miedema, teacher, coach, and the guy who will give you the coat off his back, if he’s wearing one.

When Peter Miedema was a high school student in Accord, N.Y. (population 562) he worked at an IGA owned by a local family and over the years became part of their clan.
But when they invited Peter to travel with them to India to celebrate their daughter’s arranged marriage, he hesitated.

“I had barely been out of New York state. I couldn’t handle it,” he said. “If someone today said, free trip to India, I’d say ‘Yes’ in a second.”

Peter, who has taught history for 11 years at the Shelter Island School, draws on his own fear of the unknown when he talks with his students. “I work very hard to say, ‘You have opportunities here. Go on the trips. I know you might feel scared or intimidated, but go.’”

Peter’s father, Harm Miedema, came to New York from Holland in the 1950s. In the company of his best friend, they settled near New Paltz, N.Y., and married sisters. “My dad was a dairy farmer,” Peter said. “Farming is what I was going to do.”

His mother’s father was a laborer, who loved to take his grandchildren to work. Before Peter and his brothers were old enough to ride bikes, their grandfather picked them up in his truck to spend the day with him, baling hay and building sheds.

He’s youngest of four with two brothers, and a sister Suzanne, a brilliant student who earned degrees in literature, music and French. Suzanne’s passion for learning and teaching inspired her little brother to become a teacher rather than a farmer, earning a BS in secondary education from SUNY New Paltz, and a Masters in educational psychology from the College of Saint Rose.

Around the time Peter graduated from college, his mother died of a heart attack. Flu was going around and everyone was sick. When his mother told him that she wasn’t feeling well, he figured she was coming down with the same flu that he had a few days earlier, and suggested she take it easy. By the time he returned from the gym, he found she had collapsed. She later died in surgery.

Mary Miedema took care of everyone and everything in their home, and suddenly she was gone. It was a family that took love and comfort from each other, but didn’t express it verbally. “We never said thank you, or I love you,” Peter said. “We did things because that’s your family and you just do things for people.”

Peter’s sister was still home, but his older brothers were not, and Peter felt tremendous sadness, as well as the need to step up.

“I was trying to handle my own grief and not thinking about my dad’s grief,” he said. He had to learn to cook. “He’d come home and my sister and I would have dinner ready for him.”

Peter had done some substitute teaching in college, and in 2000 got his first teaching job in Germantown, N.Y., working with kids who struggled in a regular class setting, and were often disruptive. From that school he went to an even tougher one, a year and a half at Pius XII, a residential facility for kids who were in flux between home, detention centers, or awaiting trial. It was a long way from splitting wood and working at the IGA.

His education did not completely prepare him for the students he met in those first years of teaching. “I had to adapt because these kids were not going to. I couldn’t just stick a textbook at them, and say do your work. They were acting out because they couldn’t read, they couldn’t do their work.”

In Germantown, Peter met a fellow teacher, and they married. Her parents had a place in Noyack, and while visiting them Peter first discovered Shelter Island. They moved to Long Island in 2005, and Peter began teaching at Child Development Center of the Hamptons (CDCH), a charter school for kids with learning disabilities.

CDCH had no sports program, so Peter, a lifelong athlete and avid sportsman, decided to apply for a position coaching basketball at the Shelter Island School. He started coaching basketball and baseball, and still does to this day.

A year into his coaching duties on Shelter Island and still teaching in East Hampton, Peter met the late Jack Monaghan who had learned that Peter taught history, and wondered if he would consider taking an interim position for a teacher who was on medical leave. Jack made a powerful impression on Peter, who agreed to come to Shelter Island even though it meant giving up a permanent job with no guarantee of future employment.

He started commuting from Southampton, and took the South Ferry one bitter January day in a shirt and tie. “As a kid, I would not wear a coat,” he said. “The school would call home and say, ‘If you can’t afford a coat …’ And I heard my mom tell them, ‘We have coats! He won’t wear them.’”

As he rolled off the ferry, Glenn Waddington, who was on the crew, pulled him over with bad news. Peter’s tire had a piece of metal stuck in it. Seeing that his son’s coach was not dressed for a mid-winter tire change, Glenn ordered Peter to park his truck at the ferry and leave it. “The keys are in my truck, take it, go to work,” Glenn said.

Two students in Peter’s class were also in the mechanics program at BOCES, and during a study hall went down to the ferry, took the tire off Peter’s car, fixed it, put it back, and found a volunteer to ride down to the ferry with Peter to return Glenn’s truck, refusing the money Peter tried to give them.

If he had any doubts that Shelter Island was the place to be, that settled it. “I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else,” he said. “I’ve been in all kinds of different schools, and I give a nod to the gods that this turned out to be a perfect fit.”

He’s not afraid of letting his classes get into touchy topics. “I hope they take the discussion in a direction that is uncomfortable, because we need to discuss things,” he said. “We set ground rules and we talk. It’s not always solved by compromise, but we get the issue out there.”

Peter’s still close to his friends from high school. “I have a core group of people I trust who are by my side — five or six people, we call, or text, we go on vacation together. For 25 years, we’ve always been there for each other,” he said.

After Peter and his wife split up in 2013, he moved to Shelter Island. When he’s not teaching, he’s coaching, working with a student group or walking around the Heights with Adele, a 4-year old French bulldog with black spotted ears. She also loves to ride shotgun in his truck, and Peter claims she only snores “when she is really, really tired.”

Lightning Round

What do you always have with you? If I’m not in school, my dog Adele is with me.

Favorite place on Shelter Island? The beach at Menhaden Lane.

Favorite place not on Shelter Island? Nashville with my friends.

When was the last time you were elated? This summer, when I met Joe Namath eating dinner at Isola.

What exasperates you? People who text and drive.

When was the last time you were afraid? During the recent storm there was one crack of thunder — sounded like it was right outside my door.

Favorite book? ‘Cash’ by Johnny Cash.

Favorite food? Shepherd’s pie.

Favorite person, living or dead, who is not a member of the family? Jack Monaghan.

Most respected elected official? Teddy Roosevelt.

Sign me up!

The author shares her signature with us. (Credit: Charity Robey)

Published in the Shelter Island Reporter and the Suffolk Times on January 9, 2020.

OVER THE HOLIDAYS I found a writing assignment from my grade school years and saw that my 4th-grade signature was perfection. After years of struggling mightily to learn cursive writing (a form of torture, because I’m left-handed) I achieved the looping “h” and flat-topped “r” that had eluded me for so long.

What a waste of time! Now that email, thumbprint-scanning and facial recognition have replaced pen and paper, I don’t need to write legibly, and on those rare occasions of ceremonial signing, I can create a mark that looks like the flight path of a bumblebee, and no one cares.

Today, a person’s signature is less a mark of authenticity than of self-expression, and no one expresses himself more stridently than the current President of the United States, a man whose John Hancock has been described as looking like something that scrolled off a seismograph registering an 8.2 temblor.

The presidential signature is so distinctive that when the First Family’s 2019 Christmas cards arrived, recipients could not help noticing that the jagged peaks and valleys of Donald’s signature were exactly reproduced in Melania’s signature, just below her husband’s, at half the size. The similarity in style raised the possibility that Donald forged his own wife’s signature on their holiday greeting cards. Or that she copied his.

Most of us don’t have to sign things as often as the president, and when we do it’s often on a pad or electronic device, with a bare finger, a gesture that feels as ridiculous as being sworn into office with your left hand on a book of round-trip North Ferry tickets.

Shelter Island Historical Society Director, Nanette Lawrenson told me these days, most of her signatures are applied with a finger to the screen of an iPad, as she had done the night before when she paid for dinner. “The N was sort of recognizable, followed by blobs for the rest of my name.” She confessed that her lovely penmanship, once a source of pride, is now awful. “My hand and wrist don’t even remember the movement of writing.”

Julia Labrozzi recently signed a contract for her student-teaching practicum that she’s completing at the Shelter Island School this January, just a few years after having graduated from the same school.

She regrets that her signature is not more distinctive. “Frankly, I think I have a pretty bad signature because I never learned to write in script. I don’t know if this is a bad or a good thing,” Julia said. “It’s a little sad to older generations, as writing used to be valued much more than it is now, but technology progresses, and we must adapt.”

Gina Kraus says she lives in the dark ages and likes it that way. “I still pay my mortgage every month with a signed paper and pen check,” she said. “When I sign a keypad for a credit card it looks like a 2-year old signed it, so what’s the point?”

Not everybody is ready to let go of the signature as a valid form of identification. To Virginia Gerardi, an administrator at Sylvester Manor Educational Farm, and a notary public, signatures are serious business. “It is vital to our personal security and autonomy that there be a foolproof way to identify ourselves when issuing directives and forming agreements.”

But Ginny (the name she goes by when she’s organizing wintertime volunteers to feed the Sylvester Manor chickens) is a pragmatist, so when she’s asked to sign something that is not notarized, she’s fine with e-signed documents like tax returns and real estate agreements, and she’s even made an image of her signature to insert into her emails.

Some have a wardrobe of signatures, to use as they deem appropriate. John Kaasik is preparing to start rehearsals for the school’s spring musical, which he directs, and says the last time he had to sign something was the royalty contract for Matilda, the witty, heartwarming show that is this year’s production.

“I have two signatures,” John said. “One which is legible for important documents and an unreadable scribble that I use when I’m lazy, or don’t want people to know it’s me signing.”

John says he’s O.K. with written signatures giving way to electronic identification. “The purpose of a signature is to substantiate intent — it makes sense to use a more reliable and scientific method,” he said. “I’m not ashamed of science and progress unlike many of our political leaders.”

I have no idea who John is pointing his quill pen at, but I can report that the president is also known for creating such a large signature that it takes up at least a half page of paper for the presidential moniker, thus increasing the presidential carbon footprint.

I say he should sign with his finger like the rest of us.