A Yale grad, a Harvard grad, a former Green Beret, an Alaska fisherman, a high school principal, an attorney and a temporarily homeless person walk into a bar . . .
No, it’s not the start of a joke. They are elements of Joshua Tarsky’s 48-year life history, to which he hopes to add “state representative.”
As disparate as all these roles may seem, Tarsky’s chronology actually follows a logical progression. He was born in Chicago, and his family moved to Baltimore when he was 7.
“I was not a great high school student,” Tarsky said. “I was probably in the B to C range. I was an athlete. I did a sport every single season.”
He chose to attend Ohio University, but his path was soon diverted. “My childhood best friend committed suicide, and that changed my life perspective,” he said. “It started me asking some of the deep questions maybe I would have put off until later in life. I started asking questions that I realized I didn’t have answers to. And only I could really do the searching that needed to be done to get those answers. I couldn’t find it in school.”
He opted to travel. “I ended up going to San Francisco and really hitting a low point. I ended up homeless for a brief stint.”
He worked odd jobs and came across an ad for a job on fishing boats out of Anchorage, Alaska. “It said no experience, no education was required. If you want to work hard, they’re willing to pay well.”
He spent two years working in the Bering Sea, one of the world’s most fertile and brutal fishing areas. The work was indeed hard, but he earned enough to provide the seed money to travel the world with his younger brother.
“We took off together, and it was really a very special experience,” said Tarsky. They spent time in Asia, Australia, Africa and Europe, taking assorted jobs such as fruit pickers and art salesmen to replenish their funds.
When they returned to the states he resumed his education at a community college in Florida, where his parents had moved. “By this time, after three years, I was ready,” he said.
The former middling student was now getting straight A’s. His resume earned him a spot at Yale through what is now known as the Eli Whitney Students Program, designed for non-traditional students.
He started at Yale on Sept. 1, 2001. He was 25 years old and in a meeting at a dean’s office when the Sept. 11 attacks occurred. Tarsky considered leaving school to join the military, but opted to wait until after graduation.
In 2004 he joined the Green Berets and was trained as a Special Forces medic. He ended up serving three deployments — twice to Afghanistan, once to Honduras.
“They’re a really inspired group,” Tarsky said. “I know the Navy Seals get all the love right now, but the Green Berets have a very important mission.”
In Afghanistan he was assigned to counter-insurgency operations, executing the U.S. “hearts and minds” strategy of trying to win over the local population.
“It was really trying to find the people that aligned with what the American vision was — those who we thought could actually nation-build — while also having an impact on trying to take out the people that we didn’t believe in. It was a fascinating mission.”
Tarsky helped establish clinics to provide medical services. “We did a lot of good for people who had no other options.”
He came to admire the Afghan people’s toughness and ingenuity, but he was struck by the lack of educational facilities. “I wanted to help these people. And the things that I saw, besides having laws that were not effective, there was no education. There was no girls’ school. There was no vocational school. So I tried to found both.
His initial intent when returning to the States was to attend graduate school to study international education and return to Afghanistan to continue the effort. In 2012 he received his master’s degree in international education policy from the Harvard Graduate School of Education.
“Along the way, I realized America needs a lot of help in its own education system, and as much as I wanted to help the Afghans, let’s transition to America. And then I went and became a teacher in Lawrence.”
He ended up spending four years in Lawrence, leaving in 2016 to take an assistant principal job in Sandwich while attending Suffolk Law School at night. He earned his law degree in 2019.
After six years in Sandwich, he became acting principal for four months in Mashpee before becoming principal of Holbrook Middle-High School at the start of the 2022-23 school year.
He’s also been in the National Guard since 2020, including serving as a judge advocate general defense counsel.
He and his wife, Dr. Andrea Bullock Tarsky, a physician at Beth Israel Deaconess Hospital in Boston, moved to Needham from Brookline in 2021. They have a 2-year-old son, and Tarsky has two other children, 15 and 8, from a prior marriage.
Tarsky said elected office has been on his radar, and he sees it as an opportunity to influence policies on education on a greater scale than he can as a high school principal and also expand that effort to other issues.
His campaign is being run by Kyle McGrath of Dover, who said he was drawn to Tarsky both by his life story and his dedication to service. Like Tarsky, McGrath’s college career was interrupted by a need for some soul searching.
McGrath left his original school, Williams College, and spent a few years working before receiving his degree from Stonehill College, where he was president of the student government association.
“I talked to Josh, learning his story and about the people around him with some serious mental health issues, and how that has affected his life,” said McGrath. “I realized we both had come to the same conclusion that being of service to others can be such a wonderful thing for yourself, but also for your community and keeping people tied together during a time that seems to want to rend people apart.”
Tarsky acknowledges his short tenure in Needham represents a challenge. “I know I don’t have a lot of name recognition, but I think we’ve got some smart people on the team. And over the next two months I think they’ll be hard pressed to outwork me.”
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