Carolyn Smart

John Bligh May 18, 2023

Retired teacher

Carolyn Smart, a longtime special education teacher and UFT member whose career spanned 40 years, was known as an educator who treated all her students with respect and dignity. She taught at several New York City public schools, most recently at the Manhattan School of Career Development, a 6–12 school in District 75, until her retirement in 2009. She considered educating students with disabilities to be a calling.

She died on May 18, 2023, at the age of 75, near her home in Newark, New Jersey. The cause was pneumonia.

At age 19, Carolyn moved from North Carolina to New York, where she first found work as a maid. She started her educational career as a Head Start teacher’s aide in the late 1960s and gradually worked her way up in the public school system. In the mid- to late 1990s, she attended college part-time while raising three children working at the Manhattan Occupational Training Center. She received her degree in childhood education from Adelphi University on Long Island.

Carolyn spent more than a decade — the final years of her career — at the Manhattan School of Career Development. The principal, Ewa Asterita, remembered Carolyn’s unwavering dedication to her special needs students. “Her passion for education and nurturing individual potential has left an indelible mark on the hearts and minds of those she guided,” said Asterita.

Carolyn’s colleague at the Manhattan School of Career Development, Will Shepard, considered her a mentor and an inspiration. He met her in his eighth year of teaching and immediately realized “how much I didn’t know. Carolyn demonstrated, by example, how tender guidance proved invaluable to working with students with special needs who required more than supplementary math or reading help. She was kind to all and nonjudgmental in her approach to living.”

Carolyn’s own children were similarly inspired by her commitment to her students, family and community. “She always wanted to do the right thing,” said her youngest child, Anthony J,, currently an active paraprofessional in New York City public schools. “She still had the itch to get back into teaching,” he said, but her health and the health of her husband prohibited it.

“She loved her students, even the ‘unorthodox’ students who didn’t learn or build life skills the traditional way,” said her son. “She often thought about her students who had graduated and started their life’s paths — she missed them.”

Carolyn loved to garden and cook, and she was active in her congregation, Zion Hill Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey.

She is survived by her children, Capri Smart, Charles Smart and Anthony J.; six grandchildren; 11 great-grandchildren; and a host of relatives and friends.

Condolences can be sent to

Anthony J.
41 Emmet St.
Newark, New Jersey, 07114