This Queens-bred innovator is the new superintendent of Valley Stream District 24

Unal Karakas was named superintendent of Valley Stream District 24 on July 1, succeeding Don Sturz, who announced his retirement after a four-year run.

A tall, reed-thin man often pictured in a sharply fitting navy blue suit, Karakas, 40, has a commanding presence, but balances an air of authority with a calm, gentle demeanor, to which children naturally gravitate. He hunkers down from above to meet his new students at eye level, and is an attentive listener.

With 18 years of educational experience, mostly in elementary school settings, it is clear that Karakas is in his element. “Elementary education lays the foundation for everything else that is to come,” he said. “It’s critical to set students up for success early on.” 

The Queens-bred educator, a child of Turkish immigrant parents, began his career as an elementary school teacher — in the same school he attended when he was growing up — instructing fifth and sixth grade for nearly 10 years. He earned a degree in economics at Iona College, a master’s in childhood education at New York University and a master’s in educational leadership at Iona, and is working on a doctorate in leadership and learning in organizations, with a focus on innovative and equitable leadership, at Vanderbilt University.

Growing up in a household where his parents placed an unshaken trust in public education and the doors of opportunity that it would open, Karakas took his studies seriously. Initially eyeing a career on Wall Street when he started college at Iona, his instincts pulled him to find fulfillment in the classroom after he saw the impact he made tutoring a third-grade student.

Eventually he made a name for himself, as one of 20 educators tapped by the New York City Leadership Academy to undergo an “intensive year of training and development,” as Karakas described it, with the aim of making him the principal of an ailing public school in the city and with the hope of elevating student performance. In 2017 he took the helm at P.S. 195 Elementary School in the South Bronx.

Not only did Karakas oversee steadily improving academic performance in a school where roughly one-third of students are English language learners and many enter the classroom performing well below their grade levels, but he also made notable changes to the curriculum beyond academics in an effort “to cultivate the whole child,” he said.

“I brought the arts, music and drama, and even brought co-ed sports,” Karakas recalled. “I also invested in an additional guidance counselor as well as a social worker for our schools to support our students socially and emotionally. There was only one guidance counselor in the entire school, with over 1,000 students, so providing that support was really important as well to me.”

After moving to Oceanside, Karakas became the principal of Brookside Elementary School in Baldwin in 2019, and the school was recognized as a National School of Character in 2022 for its robust and inclusive character education program. The criteria for this honor included providing students with opportunities for moral action, fostering shared leadership, and engaging families and communities as partners in character-building.

Karakas’s focus at Brookside Elementary also included innovative teaching and learning, and his school was part of the district American Association of School Administrator’s Learning 2025 initiative to create student-centered, equity-focused and future-driven education.

“We started to implement and integrate technology in meaningful ways into our curriculum,” he said. “I had second-graders who were coding and looking at robotics using Spheros to showcase their work. We did a cross-grade-level project where our kindergarten classes created maps of the neighborhood, and our second-graders used those maps to code bee pollination patterns for their science curriculum.” 

Brookside’s Hello Neighbor Project helped the district win a New York State School Boards Association Champion of Change Award.

Before joining Valley Stream District 24, Karakas served as assistant superintendent for human resources in the Glen Cove City School District, where he helped support the growth of teachers and administrators by spearheading the development of the New Administrators Academy and the New Teachers Academy. He also played an integral part in the district’s successful passage of a $30 million bond referendum in 2022.

Playing to his strengths in curriculum innovation, Karakas plans to prioritize exploring opportunities for Valley Stream 24 students to pursue “out-of-the-box” projects that align with core learning standards while giving them the freedom to pursue their own interests.

He also plans to “tap into the cultures and the backgrounds that our students bring in and make it a part of our day-to-day learning experiences,” Karakas said, and is committed to meeting students’ individual needs to prepare them for success.

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