East Catholic Mourns the Death of Founding Principal

East Catholic High School is saddened to note the passing of Reverend Charles E. Shaw, Ph. D., the school’s first principal. Father Shaw died on Friday, Nov. 18, 2011, in Arizona. He served as the first prinicpal of East Catholic High School from 1961 to 1970. 

Father Shaw was born in Bridgeport. After his ordination to the priesthood on May 3, 1951, at the Cathedral of St. Joseph in Hartford by then-Bishop Henry J. O’Brien, he was assigned to St. Francis of Assisi Parish in Naugatuck. He served as principal of the parish elementary school, then was assigned to Immaculate Conception Parish in Hartford, where he was principal of its school. After receiving his master’s in administration at Fairfield University, Father Shaw was named assistant to the superintendent of schools for the Archdiocese of Hartford.

In 1961, Father Shaw was named the founding principal of East Catholic High School; he served at East Catholic until 1970. Father Shaw earned a master’s in counseling at Central Connecticut State University, and worked as both a counselor and academic dean at St. Joseph College in West Hartford. He went on to earn a Ph.D. in administration at the University of Connecticut. He served as director of guidance counseling at the former St. Thomas Aquinas High School until his retirement in 1988. In 1994, he moved to Arizona, where he was living at the time of his death.

Father Shaw was a member of the Connecticut State Board of Higher Education, serving on the Connecticut Joint Committee on Teacher Education, the budget and finance committee, and the academic and student affairs committee. In 1978, he was honored by the New England Association of College Admissions Counselors as the outstanding independent school counselor. He was a member of Phi Kappa Phi at UConn, and received an I/D/E/A (Institute for Development of Educational Activities Inc.) fellowship from the Charles F. Kettering Foundation.

Know as the consummate educator, Father Shaw was a charismatic man who established many of the traditions that remain in place at East Catholic today. He wrote the school song and knew each of his 1,200 students by name. Father Shaw went out of his way to show kindness to others, and sought to instill a high standard of pride in the heart of every student, wanting each one to exemplify the emerging “sprit of East.”

Tom Malin, East Catholic's longtime athetlic director, recalled Fatehr Shaw as a "great human being and a caring individual." 

“He personally knew every student in our class. He’d walk up to you and call you by your first name, and when we had a reunion many years later he still remembered you," Malin said. “He really took the time out to make sure that he knew the students here at East Catholic.” 

Malin, who was among the first graduating class of East Catholic students in 1965 and was then hired by Father Shaw as a teacher in 1969, said that what he remembered most about Father Shaw was a story that occured while he was in college and not even present. In the mid-1960s, Malin said, the East Catholic boys basketball team was in the finals of its first state championship, but were down 20 at halftime. Malin said that Father Shaw addressed the players at halftime in the locker, a practice unheard of for most school princpals, and reminded them to live up to the motto that "East is best," a motto that Father Shaw devised. Malin said that team came from a 20 point deficit in the second half to win the game. 

“He always expected us to live up to that motto," Malin said of Shaw. "He always expected a lot out of us.” 

East Catholic will hold a memorial Mass for Frather Shaw at a date to be announced. Information will be posted on the school’s website — www.echs.com — when it becomes available.