BRAINTREE -- Eileen McLaughlin may be the superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Archdiocese of Boston, but she still thinks of herself as the elementary student she once was, attending Our Lady of the Presentation School in Brighton.

"To now be in the position that I'm at, I know comes from where I've been, and the people who I've met along the way, and the communities that I've been a part of," McLaughin told The Pilot in an Aug. 22 interview. "And I think there's a tremendous responsibility to serve those communities well, and it's exciting and humbling for me."

McLaughlin, who was named superintendent in May, is busy preparing for her first new school year. On Sept. 3, about 32,000 students will return to classes in the Archdiocese of Boston's 92 Catholic schools.

"It does feel like I'm responsible, and I take that really seriously," she said. "I want to serve these 32,000 students. I want to serve the teachers. I want to serve the school leaders. I want to serve the parent communities in the way that they deserve to be served, and that's a daunting task."

This school year, McLaughlin said she wants her leadership to prioritize academic excellence, faith formation, and "operational vitality."

By "operational vitality," she means identifying and preserving the systems and structures that will allow the archdiocese's Catholic schools to provide quality education while remaining financially stable.

"One of the things that I think we saw in the pandemic was Catholic schools remained open while many public school systems had to go remote, and we were able to do that because we were agile," she said. "We had the freedom to do it a little bit differently, but our agility really has to come from a firm foundation."

She is looking forward to visiting classrooms and getting to know teachers and parents.

"I think my goals for this year are to bring people together as frequently as possible, using all of the tools that now we're aware of because of the pandemic," she said. "Whether it's bringing people together via Zoom or in-person to really align or reduce isolation, bring people together to realize that we are a tremendous system. We are an institution that has resources available and can really help one another grow and make progress."

She said that the greatest challenge facing Boston's Catholic schools is "the tyranny of the urgent."

"The reality of working in schools is that there are all of these different entities that are constantly calling on us, and emergencies, situations," she said.

Anything from a broken boiler to a child in need can disrupt a school's best-laid plans.

"There's demands on our attention constantly," she said. "So, I think the thing that we need to really do is provide the space and time for planning and moving forward on strategic priorities."

McLaughlin, a fourth-generation Brighton native (her great-grandparents settled there when they came from Ireland), is a product of lifelong Catholic education. She attended elementary school at Our Lady of the Presentation and attended high school at Brighton's Mount St. Joseph Academy.

"I have never imagined myself as anything other than a teacher, honestly, from the time I was a child," she said.

The fact that her mother was a teacher further fueled McLaughlin's interest in the profession.

"I love learning, I love introducing," she said. "I love being in conversation with other people, and I think teaching is often about being in conversation with other people. And I love that idea of providing students with a foundation from which they can become the people that they were created to be, and so being a part of that has always felt like a calling to me."

While she was in high school at Mount St. Joseph, a friend's brother introduced her to her future husband, Rob, who was studying at Catholic Memorial High School in West Roxbury. The two still live in Brighton and have two sons. Their older son will begin at Xaverian Brothers High School in Westwood this fall and their younger son attends St. Columbkille School in Brighton.

"What I love about Catholic education is twofold," McLaughlin said. "One is the way in which we orient to humans. Seeing the inherent dignity of every human because each human is created in the image and likeness of God allows us then as educators to see the infinite potential of what someone can do, what someone can learn.

Secondly, she said, the goal of Catholic education is not only to teach children facts and skills but to aid in their "human formation."

"They hear the call to be a force for good in the world, and I think that's a difference," she said.

McLaughlin studied education at Boston College with the goal of becoming a high school English teacher. When she graduated in 1998, high school positions weren't available, so she taught English, history, theology, art, and even gym to seventh and eighth graders at St. Ann School in Somerville. She went on to earn her master's degree from Emmanuel in 2003, then got a job teaching history, later English, at Mount Alvernia High School in Newton. At last, she was where she wanted to be: Teaching high school English. Being in an all-girls school was an added bonus.

In 2010, McLaughlin became head of school at Mount Alvernia. She expected much of her duties to be overseeing the day-to-day operations of the school but found she was also called on to be an "instructional leader."

"Really, I was able to be a teacher of teachers in my role as principal, and that was wonderful," she said.

McLaughlin was head of Mount Alvernia from 2010 to 2019. During that time, she had a fellowship at the Lynch Leadership Academy, a Boston College program for leaders in educational settings.

"My time there, it was transformational in how I thought about myself professionally as a school leader, and it helped me to do the work I was doing much better," she said.

In 2019, the Lynch Leadership Academy was developing a "micro academy" for Catholic school leaders, and McLaughlin was offered a position as a leadership coach for Catholic school principals. During her first year in that role, the pandemic hit, and McLaughlin and her colleagues were isolated from each other.

"We realized that school leaders were alone and isolated and doing really important work, because they had to innovate in ways that we had never even conceived of having to innovate," she said.

She and her fellow Catholic school leaders had to join forces to help each other. She compared it to "building the plane as we were flying it."

"Creating conditions for them to learn together how to respond to these new challenges was a real gift," she said.

McLaughlin said that working through both the pandemic and the clergy sexual abuse crisis has taught her about leadership.

"This isn't just my professional identity, it's my personal identity as well," she said. "I grew up in a church that has lived through all of these challenges, and what I've learned about leadership is that Catholic leadership really has to prioritize pastoral care."

She added: "Responding to the needs of the people who are in need, responding to the needs of the people who have been marginalized, responding to the needs of the people who have been hurt, harmed, is really the job of leadership with a Catholic lens."

She hopes that the Archdiocese of Boston's Catholic schools will be "a beacon on a hill" like the city itself.

"We are and should be examples of how to do, how to educate, and how to evangelize and how to serve the communities we exist in," she said. "And so, I think 10 years from now, I see us being even more better, known more broadly -- locally, nationally, and beyond -- for that level of excellence."