Alabama’s newest school system launches this week at the beach: ‘Expect Excellence’

Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon speaks during a ribbon cutting ceremony of the new Orange Beach high school. The new high school and middle school was officially opened in Orange Beach, Ala., on Monday, August 10, 2020. Two years later, the city has broken away from the Baldwin County School System and is going it alone with the state's newest city school district. (John Sharp/jsharp@al.com).
  • 105 shares

Alabama’s newest school system, opening its doors for the first time on Wednesday, wants to have the same aura of the 1970s Oakland Raiders.

Back then, flamboyant team owner Al Davis ran the Raiders with the motto, “Commitment to Excellence.” It mostly worked. The team won division titles and two Super Bowls in that decade.

Related stories:

Orange Beach Mayor Tony Kennon envisions his city’s new school system operating with a similar motto, “Expect Excellence.”

“I tell people we are pretty arrogant here in Orange Beach in that we have an attitude in expecting excellence in what we do,” said Kennon, who also carries a strong personality much like Davis, and has been mayor for a long time in the small beach resort city of 6,100 residents.

“I am expecting we are excellent and being greater than great,” he said. “Anything less is unacceptable.”

In football lingo, the preparation in Orange Beach has been akin to two-a-day practices, and the summer hustle continues to get the nuts-and-bolts finalized before game day, when the students arrive this week.

“There has been a lot of work done,” said Robert Stuart, president of the brand new school board. He was put in the unusual spot of serving earlier this year on the Baldwin County School Board, only to be later appointed to the Orange Beach City School Board.

“Everything is falling into place,” he said. “I’m sure there will be hiccups here and there, but there were hiccups when we were in the county.”

He added, “We are ready.”

For years, the schools in Orange Beach were administered by the Baldwin County School System, the third largest system in Alabama with approximately 33,000 students.

Everything changed in March when the city – with little warning, and no discussion – voted unanimously to split away from the county and form its own system.

Two months later, the school boards in Orange Beach and Baldwin County OK’d a 16-page separation agreement, putting into motion the eleventh city-county school separation in Alabama in the last 22 years. The last was neighboring Gulf Shores, in 2019.

The split became official last month. A celebration occurred on July 7, during an event described by one parent as lively and cheerful, and giving attendees “goosebumps.”

“It’s a city-family that is all looking out for the children of this community,” said Christina Woerner McInnis, whose two youngest children will be attending the city schools this year. “My expectations are that I anticipate the city and leadership of Orange Beach to run the school as they run the city … it will be another part of who our city is and won’t feel like a separate function. It will be as if the city run as a family unit, one operation.”

New superintendent, new focus

Orange Beach City Schools Superintendent Randy Wilkes

Leading the new system will be Superintendent Randy Wilkes, who has a 33-year career in education and spent the past eight years in Phenix City, a city that isn’t experiencing anywhere near the growth as Orange Beach and which has a much higher poverty rate. Wilkes says he is proud of his time in a Phenix City, pointing to the improvements he said occurred in academic achievement.

Wilkes was hired in June, and he said his salary will be around $260,000 annually. That would make him among highest paid superintendents in the state.

Stuart said that Wilkes stood out among a group of strong candidates.

“I knew, and I felt that everyone else did as well, that we had our guy. He hit the ground running,” he said. “He’s spent 12-13 hours a days getting after it. I am so thankful we have him.”

Indeed, Wilkes and his staff including former interim superintendent Robbie Smith – the school’s director of curriculum and instruction – have been hustling. Wilkes, himself, has overseen the transfer of wireless Internet and security infrastructure from the county to the new city system.

Wilkes said he has served as a de facto “chief maintenance” officer, and has ensured the heating and air conditioning systems are functional ahead of the school year starting. He hopes to be able to pass the maintenance duties along soon.

“When the air conditioning doesn’t work, who do I call? Things like that,” Wilkes said. “The team we’ve assembled, we’re very small among (comparable) central office staffs. There are 90 different responsibilities being handled by six to seven people.”

Hiring was a major undertaking this summer, with the addition of a new administrative staff and the addition of new teachers. As part of the separation agreement, the approximately 130 employees who worked at Orange Beach last year were allowed to keep their jobs and retain their tenure status.

Two new pre-K units were added at the elementary school.

Wilkes said another big undertaking was the development of a board policy manual, which had to be created from scratch.

“It’s typically a year-long process,” he said. “We had to condense it to a month. We’ve taken ideas from Baldwin County’s student code of conduct and made it our own.”

Part of the school’s policies will be random drug testing of students participating in extracurricular activities and parking on campus, Kennon said.

“One thing different from our school system is that our students will know what work ethic, discipline, courtesy, respect and community service are,” said Kennon. “They will be prepared to go out into the world and make it a better place.”

Wilkes also said that parents and staff should expect changes in the school calendar for next school year.

He said he is concerned about getting enough classroom instructional time for students under the existing Baldwin County calendar, which he described as a “short school year with a lot of breaks.”

Wilkes said he prefers more time focused on classroom instruction on the “front end” of the school calendar than toward the end of May.

“We’ll get through the school year and make changes and allow stakeholders to direct us in those changes,” Wilkes said. “We are competing. I don’t want the second half (of the school year) to be heavier (with instruction) after testing. I want to get as much as we can get upfront. I would tell parents, expect a change next year.”

Four-day weeks?

A look inside the new Orange Beach high school. (supplied photo by the Baldwin County School System).

Orange Beach officials might want even bigger changes than that. At the time of the school split, Kennon said he supported an examination of moving Orange Beach to a four-day school week, instead of the traditional five.

He’s still interested in the school board exploring a four-day option.

“For me, it’s a tremendous interest,” he said. “It’s about making teaching a joy again and creating an environment conducive to learning but also not burnout.”

More than 560 public school districts in 25 states have moved to four-day school weeks, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. Colorado has the largest proportion of public schools with one or more schools on a four-day week at 98. More than 80 schools in Oklahoma are under the condensed school week. None exist in Alabama.

Proponents say the four-day school weeks can help in attendance and allows parents and teachers to schedule doctor’s appointments and other weekday commitments for Fridays rather during school days. Another benefit often cited is in recruiting teachers.

Opponents say that longer school days can be difficult for students, particularly those in elementary school. Day care can also be a challenge to families who are unable to handle Fridays without school.

Kennon said efforts are underway in Orange Beach to build a new day care center, though the particulars haven’t been ironed out yet. He said it could be constructed under a public-private arrangement, and would be able to operate on a large-scale, serving approximately 200 children.

“There is so much research and investigation that needs to be done,” he said.

Alabama State Senator Chris Elliott, R-Daphne, who recently moved to unincorporated Josephine near Orange Beach, said he believes the four-day school week is a “novel approach” that is only made possible through “the fact that they are nimble and flexible” by splintering away from the large county school system.

“I am willing to take a look at that and try for it if that is the direction they want to go,” said Elliott, whose two children entering the fifth and eighth grades will be attending Orange Beach this year.

Wilkes said he has requested more time to research the implications of going to a four-day school week, calling it a “drastic change.”

“If that’s something they want to work at and if you can show me research that it’s beneficial to students, that’s going to drive it,” said Wilkes. “Is it evidence based and, is it fiscally responsible?”

According to NCSL, little research is available on the effects of a four-day week on student outcomes. Proponents say that there are minimal financial savings that occur from shortening the school week.

Stuart said issues surrounding a flexible schedule will have to wait. The board, like Wilkes and the rest of the staff, has had to focus on priorities to get the city school system up and running by Day 1.

“We had 90 days to create a school system,” he said. “Yeah, we had the buildings. But we had to change everything about the buildings into our name, and take over the control of the Wi-Fi, the phones and the computers. In the middle of that, we had to hire people. We were meeting three to four days (each week) as a board. So, we had to prioritize.”

Stuart said there was no time for the school board to sit down and hash out the school system’s “mission statement.”

He said the school board will address questions about changing the school calendar or daily schedules in the coming year.

“We’ll do something,” he said.

Big plans

Leadership at Orange Beach city schools. From left to right: Board President Robert Stuart, Mayor Tony Kennon, Board Member Shannon Robinson, Superintendent Randy Wilkes, Board Member Randy McKinney (supplied photo)

Other big-picture items loom, including the construction of a 60,000-square-foot indoor athletic facility adjacent to the high school on Canal Road.

Kennon said the facility is “in the design phase now,” and boasts that it will be “state-of-the-art, and comparable to anything in the state of Alabama, for sure.”

Included in the facility will be a new gymnasium that will take up about 8,000 to 10,000 square feet. The remainder of the space will be for a football practice field, weight rooms, sports medicine offices, a coach’s office, and film rooms, Kennon said.

The city is also in the process of expanding its elementary school by 17,000 square feet south of the current building to accommodate, among other things, a new cafeteria and library. The addition will free up existing space for more classrooms to serve a school system that anticipates adding more students in the coming years.

The city has enough money set aside to operate the school this year, and is borrowing $50 million to make improvements. The majority, or over $42 million, will be spent to pay Baldwin County for the school facilities and to finance the expansion at the elementary school. As part of the city-county split, the county received $35.5 million in cash before July 1.

The city raised its lodging tax rate by 3-percentage points last spring to raise enough revenues to finance the school system.

The tax increase does not begin taking effect until next year, but the city is flush with plenty of lodging tax revenues thanks to popularity of its beaches and the city’s tourism economy over the past decade. The city has liquid assets at around $108 million.

“We don’t see any stumbling blocks,” Kennon said.

If you purchase a product or register for an account through a link on our site, we may receive compensation. By using this site, you consent to our User Agreement and agree that your clicks, interactions, and personal information may be collected, recorded, and/or stored by us and social media and other third-party partners in accordance with our Privacy Policy.

X

Opt out of the sale or sharing of personal information

If you opt out, we won’t sell or share your personal information to inform the ads you see. You may still see interest-based ads if your information is sold or shared by other companies or was sold or shared previously.