DYER BROOK, Maine — Whoever once said “you can’t come home,” failed to pass that message along to Oakfield native Jason Tarr.
Tarr was unanimously chosen as the district’s new assistant principal and athletic director during an RSU 50 board meeting in October. He will work directly with district principal Jon Porter guiding both Southern Aroostook Community School and Katahdin Middle-High School.
Tarr has had a long career in education. He served as the middle school principal at Houlton Southside School from 2007-11. Prior to his time at HSS, Tarr worked at Palermo Consolidated School near Augusta, where he worked for four years. He also worked in central Maine for about 10 years and taught at Limestone and Hodgdon before becoming an administrator in Ashland.
Tarr left his position at HSS in December, 2011 to pursue a calling in ministry and also became a vegetable farmer. He worked about 15 acres filled with vegetables on the family farm in Oakfield.
“Business was good,” he said. “We were never able to keep up with customer demand, which I never thought would be the case.”
However, with just himself and his wife Alyssa, the Tarrs were not able to keep up with the demands of the farm and balance the family budget, without expanding and hiring additional staff.
“I couldn’t do farming full time and pay all the bills, so I had to do some other things, which was very demanding,” he said. “I was ready to take that next step with it (farming).”
He was also involved in the formation of the River Cafe in Island Falls with Pete Connelly.
“We spent one winter doing the restaurant and the next winter renovating an apartment building in downtown Island Falls,” he said. “The plan was to get the restaurant up and running, hire staff and let them manage it.”
A native of Oakfield, Tarr graduated from Southern Aroostook. He has lived in many parts of the state, but something keeps drawing him back to his hometown, where he had built a house next to his childhood home. Tarr hails from a family of potato farmers, and he is grateful that he had the opportunity to show his son the virtues of being a potato farmer.
“I was never planning to be out of education forever,” he said. “I didn’t know for sure when I would get back into it, but I knew it would happen sometime.”
That sometime turned out to be December, 2014. He has an adult stepson in Auburn and stepdaughter in Westbrook, so the Tarr family packed up their belongings and moved to southern Maine, where he landed a job in Lewiston at Longley Elementary School.
When he learned RSU 50 had created an assistant principal/athletic director position, Tarr said the draw to return home was too much to ignore.
“I really couldn’t pass up this opportunity,” he said. “It made sense. I knew many of the people. Some of the teachers are still here from when I was in school.”
His new position will be challenging based on the geography of the two schools, which are located 20 miles apart. They are still working out the details of which administrator will be at which school on a given day.
“Jon (Porter) and I couldn’t do this without the fabulous secretaries at both schools,” Tarr said.
