Sister Joan McDonald, 'teacher par excellence,' dies at 96

She was a devoted member of the Sisters of St. Dominic of Amityville, but Sister Joan McDonald was above all an educator.

"She was always a teacher par excellence," said Sister Judy Flanagan of that order, who had lived with Sister Joan for many years in Bethany Convent in Jamaica, Queens, when they both taught at the now-gone all-girls Dominican Commercial High School there. "She really loved teaching. That was her gift."

At an earlier post in Ozone Park, the-then all-boys St. Elizabeth School, now St. Elizabeth Catholic Academy, Sister Joan taught eighth-grade boys. As adults, a group of them "would take her out to eat about twice a year," said Sister Judy. "It was really something. They would be in their 50s and they were still taking her out."

"She was just natural in her teaching abilities," said Marianne Dayton, of Kings Park, one of seven surviving nieces and nephews, recalling that "even for us kids she made learning fun. It was always a game: ‘Let's go down to the beach and we'll pick up shells and then we'll talk about shells and where they come from and what kind of shell it is.’ She just made everything so that you were learning without even knowing you were being taught something."

After leaving education in 1990 to live at the order’s retirement community in its Rosary Hall, she put her organizational skills to use where needed. Eventually she entered the nursing-care unit in the order’s Carlin Hall, where she died of natural causes on Dec. 8, at age 96.

Joan McDonald was born on Aug. 7, 1928, in Islip, one of two daughters of John F. McDonald, a career cook at the now-closed Kings Park Psychiatric Center, and Mary O’Rourke McDonald, an Irish immigrant who worked in the center’s laundry before spending two decades as a bookkeeper for the Kings Park Central School District. Joan was close to her younger sister, Mary, called Mae, who also became a teacher and died in 2019.

Growing up in Kings Park, Joan attended Water Mill’s Dominican Juniorate boarding high school, intending to become a nun. In September 1946, she entered the Novitiate of the Sisters of St. Dominic in Amityville, and a year later received the name Sister Timothy Anne.

Earning bachelor’s and master’s degrees at St. John’s University in Queens, she took posts teaching history and social studies in that borough’s St. Clement Pope School, which closed in 2004; St. Elizabeth School; and St. Agnes Academic High School, which closed in 2001.

She then taught for a year at a parochial school in Puerto Rico before beginning at Dominican Commercial, teaching at the Queens school for nearly 20 years until retirement.

She had a strong personality, Sister Judy said. "She was a very ladylike, refined person in many ways, but she had no trouble speaking her mind. She was very politically astute about what was going on in the world, and even on a personal level of things that were happening within our own congregation. She had her opinions and she wasn't afraid to say them."

Yet she never wanted to enter administration. "She once attended the [annual] National Catholic Educational Association meeting," recalled Sister Judy, "and she told me afterward, ‘I was going to sit with all these principals and I thought I would learn all the latest things in education. And Judy, they just talked about how you could make money if you sell jackets with the name of the school, and it was all about fundraising.’ So an administrator mind is different. She was very much the educator." 

Her hobbies included crocheting and traveling, said her niece, who as a child accompanied her aunt and other family members on four sojourns to Europe.

Sister Joan is survived by seven nieces and nephews and by several grandnieces and nephews. A wake and Mass of Christian burial took place Friday, followed by interment in St. Dominic Cemetery on the Amityville grounds of the convent’s motherhouse.