Jody (left) and Liz Matta pose outside of their home, Kiah Bailey Hall, on the Lincoln Academy campus in Newcastle. The couple moved to Newcastle in 2015 to become dorm parents after their youngest child graduated Morse High School. (Sherwood Olin photo)
Elizabeth “Liz” Matta said she has been lucky enough to always know what she wanted to do and where she wanted go. As a grade school student she watched a teacher inspire a struggling student and was inspired for life.
“So, so fortunate, because I know so many people go the opposite way, where they try things, they love some things, and life brings them other things,” Liz Matta said.
Liz’s wife, Jody Matta said she was not blessed with such clarity.
“I’m the opposite story from what Liz has,” Jody Matta said. “She always knew what she wanted to do. That’s what it was, and that’s what she did and I definitely walked around amongst things a little bit, one somewhat related to the other.”
Today both Mattas work in education and up until last year, they both worked at Lincoln Academy in Newcastle where they currently reside as dorm parents in Lincoln Academy’s Kiah Bailey Hall, the residential quarters for the school’s boarding students.
“Our youngest graduated from Morse in 2015 and we still felt like we were young enough to still give a lot of kids love,” Liz Matta said. “I’d been teaching here for 10 years, and as this program developed, I just really appreciated the way it was developing.”
Liz Matta grew up in Foxborough, Mass. and began her teaching career in Damariscotta as a 22-year-old college graduate in 1999. She spent five years as the band director at Great Salt Bay Community School before leaving for the same position at Lincoln Academy in 2005.
Jody Matta grew up in what she described as an “ultra-conservative” area in central Pennsylvania. After a stint in the Air Force, she moved to Maine in the 1990s with her husband, a native of the state, and their three children. After the marriage ended, Jody Matta felt at home in Maine and thought it was more economically viable than her hometown.
“My town (in Pennsylvania) was like a lot of towns here in Maine,” Jody Matta said. “There just wasn’t a lot once the mills shut down.”
Unlike Liz Matta, Jody Matta tried several different careers before entering education. For a while she did tech support for the University of New England and later became a massage therapist. While contemplating a career as a physician’s assistant, she completed her college degree.
Years later, encouraged by her now-wife, Jody Matta secured an ed tech position at Lincoln. She went on to earn her teaching certification in 2017 and secured a teaching position in the school’s alternative education program, which Lincoln Academy calls “edLab,” before becoming the program’s director.
“The really interesting thing to me about being where I am is that as I did the different things that I did on my way here, when I finally started in this program, I realized that almost all of those things were leading me up to this,” she said.
EdLab students have fallen behind their peers at grade level for any number of reasons, Jody Matta said. Some have to work to support their family or care for siblings and don’t have time for schoolwork. Others don’t do well in a traditional classroom environment. They all require some type of accommodation to get back on track.
“There’s multiple reasons that people end up there, but it’s ultimately a place for students who are credit deficient, who are super anxious in the regular classroom,” Jody Matta said. “Sometimes they’ve had life circumstances, something big came up, and it put them behind in their schoolwork, but basically, our program is a place to meet those students where they are and get them to graduation.”
According to Jody Matta, her first marriage was already badly disintegrated before, on a separate track, she began coming to realizations about herself. She was 28 years old when she came out, and coped with her new life by being single for a lengthy period of time until she met the woman who would become her wife.
They met in a bar in Portland in January 2001. Ironically, neither Liz nor Jody Matta are “bar people,” they said. On that occasion, both had been convinced by friends, dragged really, to come out for the evening. Jody said she noticed Liz, but didn’t dare to ask her to dance until one of her friends encouraged her with the classic “if you don’t, I will,” method.
Liz Matta said she doesn’t recall being asked to dance but she does remember the meeting and the immediate connection.
“On our first phone call, she said, ‘What do you think about kids?’ and I said, ‘Teacher! I love kids!’” Liz Matta said. “It was pretty clear kids were part of the package.”
They officially married on St. Patrick’s Day 2013, waiting until Maine legalized same-sex marriage at the polls in November 2012 before they scheduled a ceremony for themselves.
“We would have gotten married probably a year after we met,” Liz Matta said. “At that point, our kids and our families knew we were committed, and it didn’t make sense for us, to do kind of like a marriage thing. It just wasn’t us until we knew that everybody could get married.”
Theirs was a small ceremony, attended only by their three children and family members. The kids made the wedding cake and the Mattas ordered a sandwich platter from Subway.
“We weren’t really interested in necessarily, it being a big to-do,” Jody Matta said. “We just really want to have our core family and friends there and just something, because honestly, at that point we didn’t know if it was going to stick … We wanted to do it and get it done while it was legal because we didn’t know if we would lose that right.”
Unlike Liz Matta’s parents who were always supportive of their daughter, Jody Matta’s Pennsylvania family was less so. It took a couple of visits, but once her mother came to Maine and saw the Mattas with their kids she was satisfied.
“She said these guys have two adults who love them, and that’s it,” Jody Matta said. “That was a big piece of it, you know? A lot of people think that because we like somebody who’s the same sex with us, that we’re so different, and when they realize, oh, wait, these are just two people that go through the same struggles and the same everyday things that everybody else does. We are not different in the way that they think that we might be different. We’re all really quite the same.”
For nine years after moving to Newcastle the couple doubled as instructors and dorm parents. Jody Matta continues to work at Lincoln as the director of the school’s alternative education program. In 2024, Liz Matta left after 19 years as the school’s band director to accept a similar position at Harrison Middle School in Yarmouth.
Liz Matta said the decision to leave a difficult one, but every indicator told her to take the new job. With regard to how perilous the preteen years can be, Matta said she always wanted to teach middle school.
“You look at the last part of your career, 15 years or whatever, and you think, ‘how do you want to end this?’” she said. “As much as I loved it here, I was also being pulled back to the original reason I wanted to teach in terms of helping kids find that confidence.”
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