CARIBOU, Maine – Caribou High School Principal Mark Jones stepped down on June 30 to take up his new responsibilities as the director for the RSU’s Gear Up grant, and Jones said, “It certainly wasn’t an easy choice.”
As part of the federal Gear Up grant Jones will be responsible for designing activities for at risk students to help them gain college readiness, Jones said. “It starts with grades seven and eight and we go all the way up through their freshman year of college.”
Jones had contemplated retirement and said the part he would miss the most would be working with the kids. So when this grant opportunity arose it allowed him to leave the managerial responsibilities behind and still continue to work with kids. “I’m stepping out of my principal duties into something that will help me transition toward retirement.”
Jones has been principal of CHS for eight years. He was an automotive teacher in the vocational center for 11 years prior to that. He didn’t plan on becoming a principal. “It was evolution. You start out teaching and then I started participating in department chair teams and that evolved as I got my degrees,” he explained. Jones worked his way up to becoming principal over the years while earning his master’s degree in education leadership.
Jones was born on the former Loring Air Force Base and grew up living and breathing everything automotive and helped his father at their family service station. “We had a family business that catered to the base. My dad had a service station that I’d worked in by the time I was old enough to sweep and pump gas. So when I graduated high school I started my own body shop and ran that for eight years.”
Later on Jones would consolidate his business with his father’s and they began Loring Service Station.
When the base closed Jones began substituting for the Caribou Technology Center in the early 1990s after receiving his dual associate’s degree in automotive technology and auto body repair from NMCC.
