A Jack-Of-All-Trades Retires From Bridgehampton School

The Bridgehampton School’s jack-of-all-trades, Judiann Carmack-Fayyaz, has retired after 16 years at the school and three more at the Ross School before that.

Carmack-Fayyaz was working as a landscape designer when she had lunch with an administrator at the Ross School, who told her she should become a teacher in the school’s new “Career Connections” program.

“It was an incredible opportunity,” she said. “I discovered I loved teaching and was better at teaching than I was at running a business.”

Carmack-Fayyaz taught landscape design courses to a group of students who included one from Bridgehampton, who attended her classes through an exchange program. When Ross decided to drop the program when enrollment slumped, in a second bit of serendipity, Carmack-Fayyaz was hired by Bridgehampton, first on a part-time, and later on a full-time basis.

“When I went to Bridgehampton, I noticed the difference in the student body — literally,” Carmack-Fayyaz said. “I thought we need to focus on food education.”

Although Carmack-Fayyaz had never farmed, and wasn’t particularly interested in growing vegetables, she shifted focus. Along with her garden design courses, she taught food education classes, and soon had turned a plot of land on the school campus into a thriving vegetable garden.

Over the years, when a farm stand right next to the school became available, the district leased it, allowing students to gain experience in the retail sale of the vegetables they grow in the schoolyard.

Carmack-Fayyaz’s career took another turn when she added computer-aided design to her landscape design courses. “That’s how I fell into teaching tech,” she said. When longtime teacher Joseph Zaykowski retired, Carmack-Fayyaz took his position. While Zaykowski had focused on more traditional shop classes, such as woodworking, Carmack-Fayyaz took things in a different direction.

Elementary school students were learning Lego robotics, but when high school students said they wanted to have their own robotics class, Carmack-Fayyaz agreed to teach it along with fellow teacher Ken Giosi. An old college friend had ties to the First Robotics competition, and helped Bridgehampton obtain mentoring and grant money.

In 2015, a rookie Bridgehampton team qualified for the nationals in St. Louis, no small feat in itself. “There was an area about eight football fields with 76 teams competing on each,” she recalled. Bridgehampton finished the competition way back in the pack. “We were just happy to be there,” she said.

But before the final rounds began, team members heard their number being called over the public address system. Two other teams had seen something in Bridgehampton’s design that would make its robot valuable, so in the First Robotics tradition, they asked Bridgehampton to form an alliance for the final round.

The combined team eventually finished fourth, and although Bridgehampton’s robot was not pressed into service for the finals, the experience was a heady one for the team. “It was pretty miraculous it got chosen,” Carmack-Fayyaz said.

A native of Rockville Centre, Carmack-Fayyaz, who is 61, began college at the State University of New York at Buffalo and later transferred to New York University’s University without Walls program.

“In the back of my mind, I aways knew I wanted to learn experientially, I wanted to be hands-on,” Carmack-Fayyaz said. “If you don’t make something relevant, it seems like either a waste of time or you have a hard time holding onto it.”

She spent three years studying in Paris, and eventually obtained a master’s degree in French culture.

Back in the United States, Carmack-Fayyaz tried her hand at banking, but an early interest in gardens and plants took hold.

Carmack-Fayyaz took classes in flower arrangement at the New York Botanical Garden. “I went all the way through the certificate program, and the last class was funeral design,” she said. “I would die if I had to do that every day.”

In the mid-1990s, Carmack-Fayyaz and her husband bought their house in North Sea, where she began to try her hand at landscape design. They spent time in England, where she continued her education and developed the business she would later give up for teaching.

Carmack-Fayyaz said she has some plans for the future that she can’t divulge, but she said part of her long-term plan includes a second sojourn in France.