Mobile Education History

• Before 1826 several private schools were operating in Mobile
• 1826 The first public school system in Alabama was established in Mobile. The Alabama Legislature enacted a bill drafted by Mobile’s representative, Willoughby Barton, establishing a board of Mobile School Commissioners.
• 1836 Barton Academy is constructed on Government Street as a public free school. The construction was funded by private donations, a city loan, a state-approved lottery, and the school commissioners’ fund and loans. Financial problems forced the school to close several years later and funds were channeled into church schools.
• 1838 A Catholic orphanage and two Catholic schools, one for boys and one for girls, are established. By 1844, Catholic schools are providing instruction to 90 orphans in addition to 60 girls and 40 boys.
• 1842 Methodists, in cooperation with the Unitarians, opened the first Protestant free school in Mobile, Methodist Free School.  This is followed by the Presbyterian Bethel School and Episcopal schools
• 1846 The Alabama Legislature passed legislation permitting taxpayers to redirect their school taxes to the church schools
• 1853 Alabama enacts anti-Catholic legislation directed at the Mobile County school system which prohibits the diversion of Mobile County public school funds to any school “that is not strictly common to all children of the county, or to any that is under sectarian influence or control.”
• Sources: Amicus curiae, Locke v. Davey (2003)

Mobile County Public School System

• Public schools in Mobile are operated by the Mobile County Public School System.  
  • Mobile County School Board Members 
• The MCPSS moved out of Barton Academy into the former QMS campus off Schillinger Road 
• In 2001, MCPSS was so troubled that it was scheduled to be taken over by the state. Voters hadn’t approved new funding for the district in 41 years. Business leaders joined civic leaders to push for a new property tax to fund the schools: 10,000 people turned out to rally before the vote and the funding passed. – “Good Schools Can Happen,” Parade Magazine, 8/27/06 
• Saraland voted in 2006 to break off from the Mobile County Public School System, the first city in the system to ever do so.
• Roy Nichols became superintendent of the Mobile County school system in 2008. He was a 63-year-old professor at the University of West Georgia. 
• Mobile County schools began random drug testing for students in 2007. Students who participate in extra-curricular activities will be placed in a pool with students who drive to school and with students whose parents volunteer them for testing. An estimated 10 percent of the students from that pool will be asked to submit urine tests each year.

 The Mobile Area Education Foundation was founded in 1992 by Carolyn Akers as “Mobile 2000″. 

• • The Partner in Education Program in Mobile County links over 1,000 businesses, organizations, churches and individuals, who make an annual impact of over $2.3 million to our schools in Mobile County. 

 MCPSS Performance

• High School Graduation Rates
• According to the Alabama Department of Education the 2008 graduation rate in Mobile County high schools is 87 percent, up from 84 percent the year before. But Voices for Alabama’s Children in Montgomery, which uses a nationally recognized formula similar to what the state education department will use next year, places the countywide average at 59 percent. – PR 10/20/08
  • For the past couple of years, Alabama has used its own formula to calculate graduation rates, resulting in a state average this year of 83 percent. But beginning next year, Alabama and many other states will move to a formula adopted by the National Governors Association, meaning the rates will drop as much as 30 percentage points. That formula takes the number of students graduating and divides that figure by the number of ninth-graders that entered that school four years before. Schools will not get credit for students who graduate in five years or who leave and get a GED.
  • Five of Mobile County’s 13 high schools — Baker, Blount, Bryant, LeFlore and Murphy — did not meet state standards in 2008 because of low graduation rates. The formula currently used by the Alabama Department of Education puts those five schools’ graduation rates at between 74 and 88 percent. The schools that did not meet state standards because of graduation rate were not necessarily the schools with the lowest rates.  B.C. Rain had the second-lowest rate in the county at 77 percent, but it met the standard because it did not drop. Baker, Bryant, LeFlore and Murphy had rates about 10 percentage points higher than Rain’s, but did not meet the standard because their numbers went down. The federal No Child Left Behind Act requires schools to have a graduation rate of at least 90 percent or show improvement from the previous year to be in compliance.
• In 2008 nine Mobile County schools did not meet state standards, including six high schools (Baker, Blount, Bryant, LeFlore, Murphy and Williamson) and 3 elementary schools (Hamilton, Orchard and Will). In 2008, for the first time, all 21 of the system’s middle schools met academic standards, known as AYP or Adequate Yearly Progress.
  • Prichard’s Blount High School performed among the lowest in the state, as students’ overall reading scores on the Alabama High School Graduation Exam were low.
  • Mobile County public schools not meeting state standards had risen from 12 in 2006 to 21 in 2007.
• Four Mobile County public schools must give students an opportunity to transfer to better-performing schools under the federal No Child Left Behind Act: Chastang, Denton and Mae Eanes middle schools and Gilliard Elementary. That’s down from eight last year. Two years ago, 22, or nearly one-fourth, of Mobile County’s schools had to offer transfers. Although all four met state academic and attendance standards for 2008, they will have to do so again in 2009 to lift the transfer designation.
• Mobile County outperforms the state’s other large school systems when it comes to how black and white students, as well as poverty and non-poverty students, perform on standardized tests, according to a new study by The Public Affairs Research Council of Alabama, based on the 2007 Alabama Reading and Mathematics Test. – PR 1/27/08
  • Mobile only graduates about 63 percent of its students, compared with the state average of 69 percent. The study compared the numbers of students enrolled (in 1995) in the first grade versus the numbers graduating last year, which does not account for population inflow.– PR 1/27/08
  • Mobile County public school students earned an average ACT score of 19 out of 36. The state average was 20. Baldwin County public school students averaged a 21. or outflow.– PR 1/27/08
  • The Alabama Department of Education uses a method approved by most other states in accordance with the No Child Left Behind Act, which gives Alabama schools credit for graduating 82 percent of their students. Other studies have placed Alabama’s graduation rate in the 50 to 60 percent range.  – PR 1/27/08
• George Hall Elementary in Mobile’s Maysville area has captured a prestigious award from the National Principals Leadership Institute in New York City.
• The three high schools that did not meet standards had graduation rates as follows: B.C. Rain off Dauphin Island Parkway, 77 percent; Vigor in Prichard, 73 percent; and Williamson, near Mobile’s Maysville community, 72 percent.
• Mae Eanes Middle School, near Mobile’s Maysville community, had the longest running streak in Alabama for not having met standards at eight years, until it met standards in 2008. The school has been restaffed several times over the years. Officials at Mae Eanes said they saw an escalation in fights during 2005-06 when students from various public housing communities moved into the Mae Eanes zone as a result of housing renovations. The school has been taken over by the state twice in recent years. It was one of Mobile County’s five troubled schools to begin the transformation schools program in 2004 that received national media attention. The entire school was restaffed with teachers who receive cash bonuses as standardized test scores improve.

 MCPSS Finances

• The system’s budget is $712 million.
• Mobile County Public School System approved $35 million in budget cuts, which includes the elimination of hundreds of teaching and other positions. The school system has sent letters to about 1,200 employees telling them that they are being transferred or fired. Officials said they hope to hire about half of them back.
  • Board member Fleet Belle said he is concerned that the cuts didn’t reach high enough.  Absent from the list were any of the recently added $100,000-plus salaried assistant superintendents. Nichols said he plans to cut the number of assistant superintendent spots from twelve to ten. – PR 5/6/08
• Officials said the school system has been overspending for several years and that the system has dipped too far into its state-required savings account to stay afloat. That account is supposed to have about $40 million. Instead, it will have about $7 million by the end of the fiscal year. School officials are also expecting about $17 million worth of cuts from the state budget.
• In 2008, the Mobile County School board required a session in which they were instructed on the basics of reading financial statements.
•  Salaries of administrators in Mobile County public schools central offices have more than doubled from $5.3 million in 2004 to a projected $11.1 million in 2008. During that time, the number of those positions rose from 93 to 165 while student enrollment dropped from 65,037 to 64,335. Dodge said the system spends about 4 percent of its annual budget on administrative costs, which he said is about 4 percentage points lower than other districts.  – PR 12/23/07
• The school system owns 22,000 acres of “16th Section” land. – PR 4/7/08
  • In the early 1800s, the state gave all county school systems every 16th section of land. Mobile County, which still has about 35 of those parcels, is one of the few systems in the state that has held onto the bulk of its land.
  • The system makes about $4 million a year off the land by selling timber and granting leases for hunting, according to school officials. Mobile County schools Superintendent Roy Nichols said the system is looking at possibly doubling the amount of timber cut, which would total about $1.4 million next year. He said the school system has never had a habit of selling its land, and he doesn’t plan to start doing that now.
  • Mobile Area Education Foundation director Carolyn Akers has suggested that the School System sell off some land or find other sources of revenue rather than make teacher cuts as a result of the upcoming budget shortfall.
  • State law prohibits the system from selling the historic Barton Academy, which until 2007 housed central offices. However, that it might be able to sell the Russell building off Broad Street for up to $700,000.
• Wade Perry, a director of the local Alabama Education Association teachers union, has asked the school board to reduce the system’s legal expenses, which total about $700,000 a year. – PR 4/7/08

 Mobile County Public High Schools

• Murphy High School was built in 1926 on 28 acres from the Carlen Estates, to relieve overcrowding at Barton Academy when World War I soldiers returned to complete their education. Mobile architect George B. Rogers designed seven Spanish Revival Style buildings to serve all of Mobile County’s grades 9-11. First named Mobile High, the school’s name was changed in 1928 to honor Samuel Silenus Murphy, a superintendent of public education for twenty-five years. It is Alabama’s largest public school.
• Alabama School of Mathematics and Science opened in 1991 and is operated by The State of Alabama.
  • Alabama School of Mathematics and Science was ranked Alabama’s ninth best school by Newsweek.
  • The school takes in about 300 students in grades 10 through 12 each year from across the state. The students live on campus and take college-level courses. – PR 5/22/08
  • ASMS Video
• John L. LeFlore High School was founded in 1968 as Toulminville High School.
  • The Mobile County school board approved a plan to convert LeFlore High School into a magnet school specializing in pre-medicine and pre-law, beginning this August. Schools Superintendent Roy Nichols said this new curriculum will replace an “ill-conceived” plan to change the school into a college preparatory academy in 2006. – PR 6/2/08
• Vigor High School in Prichard was given a “Bronze” listing in U.S. News and World Report’s national list of high schools based on how well poor and minority students did on state tests and also on how well students do on Advanced Placement tests. Vigor did not meet state standards this year, and has been on and off the state’s list of struggling schools for the last decade. But the school in recent years has implemented tutoring and remediation programs. Vigor was severely damaged during 2004’s Hurricane Ivan and students spent a year in their rival school, the old Blount High School, while Vigor was renovated. The school’s zone was redrawn, which resulted in a reduction of students from 1,400 to 800. The school added a math and science academy that’s open to about 30 students a year countywide. Vigor’s juniors scored four percentage points higher than the state average on both the reading and math portions of the Alabama High School Graduation Exam. – PR 5/22/08
• Blount High School, which has about 1,000 students, moved to Lott Road in northwest Prichard in 2005. The old school temporarily housed students from Vigor High School until renovation work was completed at Vigor. The old Blount High School in Prichard will house an alternative school for the Phoenix Program run by the 100 Black Men of Mobile.
  • In 2006, eight Blount High School students, both girls and boys, were arrested for fighting at the Prichard campus. According to police, the fight appeared to be related to ongoing quarrels between students living in the Trinity Gardens and Crichton communities. – PR 6/18/08
• Baker High School in West Mobile has 1,948 students.
• B.C. Rain High School on Dauphin Island Parkway in South Mobile opened in 1963
• Williamson High School in the Maysville Community in South Mobile first began as a small neighborhood school in 1916 housed in the Sons and Daughters of Honor Hall, with its first graduating class in 1959. It is named after former principle Lillie B. Williamson
• Shaw High School Shaw High was closed in 2008 by the school board.
  • The school board voted in 2004 to rezone Shaw’s students to Blount High in Prichard and to convert Shaw into a career-technical academy. But the system never came through with funds to establish the academy, so the school’s numbers dwindled.
  • It cost the system more than $30,000 per student to keep Shaw open for 2007-2008, which saw 10 students graduate.
  • Nichols said he plans to come before the board soon with a plan for Shaw, which was built in the 1960s and once served more than 1,000 students. He said a committee is reviewing about a dozen possibilities for the school, including returning it to a regular high school with a zone; converting it into a magnet school; using it as an adult education school; or establishing a new vocational-technical school. – PR 5/13/08
• Magnet Schools: Phillips Preparatory School, LeFlore Preparatory Academy, Dunbar School of the Creative and Performing Arts (grades 4-8), Clark School of Mathematics, Science and Technology; Chickasaw School of Mathematics, Science and Technology (K-3), Council Traditional School (K-5), Old Shell Road School of the Creative and Performing Arts (K-3)

Private and Parochial High Schools

• McGill-Toolen Catholic High School came into existence in 1973 through the merger of McGill Institute for Boys (founded in 1896) and Bishop Toolen High School for Girls (founded in 1928). It has approximately 1100 students.
  • McGill Institute was founded in 1896 by Arthur and Felix McGill as a free school for boys. In 1928, the Brothers of the Sacred Heart took over the administration and continue to serve on the faculty today. The original McGill Institute building was located on Government Street and demolished in 1955. In 1952, the school moved to Old Shell Road, across the street from Bishop Toolen School for Girls.
  • The Bishop Toolen School for Girls was founded in 1928, by Bishop Thomas J. Toolen, and was administered by the Sisters of Loretto at the Foot of the Cross until it merged with McGill Institute
  • IN 2007 the school annouced it had raised $10.3 million to renovate the campus, including a new science building, and construction of a football stadium at the Archbishop Lipscomb Sports Complex.
  • The Archdiocese of Mobile also has 11 elementary schools and Mobile and Baldwin counties
• UMS-Wright Preparatory School: University Military School and the Julius T. Wright School for Girls merged and became UMS-Wright in 1988. The Wright School was founded in 1960 with Caldwell Delaney as its first headmaster. 
• St. Paul’s Episcopal School

Colleges and Universities

• 2007 enrollment: University of South Alabama: 14,003; University of Mobile: 1,527; Spring Hill College: 1,488;
• Spring Hill College was founded in 1830 by Bishop Michael Portier, and taken over by the Jesuits in 1847. It was the first Catholic college in the South and the fifth oldest Catholic college in the United States.
• University of Mobile was founded as Mobile College in 1964.

The University of South Alabama

• University of South Alabama
• Fred Whiddon came to Mobile in 1960 with a vision to build a major university. He was the director of the University of Alabama’s, two-year extension campus here at the time, and persuaded local leaders and legislators to create a four-year, degree-granting institution. The Legislature approved in 1963; a year later, the ribbon was cut. Whiddon personally signed for a $250,000 bank loan to help build the first building. He went to local high schools to recruit students, and worked long hours to attract top professors.
• Whiddon, while criticized in later years for micro-managing, has overseen the expansion of the University of South Alabama to 12,000 students, three hospitals and extensive timberlands and natural gas reserves in assets. Whiddon retired in 1998.
• In 1998, Gordon Moulton became the USA President. Under Moulton, enrollment has significantly increased. Moulton has demonstrated an ability to maintain a cohesive relationship with the Board of Trustees, the faculty and other top administrators that his predecessor, the late Frederick Whiddon, lacked toward the end of his tenure at USA.
• The USA Foundation which manages the University’s $318 million (2007) endowment has close to 50 percent of their investments in timberland.
  • In 1999, Don Langham and the late Jack Brunson applied their names to the somewhat unsuccessful lawsuit that sought to regain control of the assets of the USA Foundation. The suit eventually led to more cooperation between the board of trustees, the University’s administration and the USA Foundation. Langham has been synonomous with the union movement in Mobile.
  • A large part of the USA Foundation’s holdings comes from federal Medicaid funds received by the university hospitals for treating large numbers of poor patients. More than $135 million in such disproportionate share payments were transferred to the foundation by the university starting in 1989. Frederick Whiddon, USA’s founding president, made the transfers as part of his dream of building a $1 billion endowment at the foundation. Displeasure with the transfers was one of the root causes that eventually led Mayer Mitchell and the other trustees to force Whiddon to resign in 1998. The loyalist board of the foundation created a managing director post for Whiddon, which he held until his May 2002 death. Since Whiddon left USA, the university and the foundation have been embroiled in a struggle over who should control the foundation’s investment policies and direct its giving to USA. – PR 8/11/03
  • Since May 2000, the university has built a new $15.4 million endowment under the direct control of its board of trustees,
  • Tensions have eased between the managers of the Foundation, the University’s administration and the University’s faculty.
  • The USA Foundation acquired 529,000 acres of timber land from Kimberley-Clark in 1999. The USA Board of trustees was at odds with the Foundation, arguing that borrowing $300 million and putting up hard cash and others assets to cement the Kimberley-Clark deal would tie up too much of the Foundation’s discretionary income in timber investment.
• The editorial staff of The Vanguard ranked the 10 most powerful people at USA in April 2006: 1. Mayer Mitchell, entrepreneur and trustee. 2. Gordon Moulton, University of South Alabama President. 3. Sam Jones, Mayor of Mobile and trustee. 4. Don Langham, Union leader and trustee pro tem. 5. Wayne Davis, Vice President for Financial Affairs. 6. (tie). Dale Adams, Vice President for Student Affairs. 6. (tie) Steve Stokes, Physician and trustee. 8. Maxey Roberts, Managing Director of the USA Foundation. 9. Joe Gottfried, USA Athletics Director. 10. Patsy Covey, Vice President for Academic Affairs
• USA Brookley Center – Map

Bishop State Community College

• Bishop State has been scrutinized by the two-year system, state auditors, the U.S. Department of Education, the FBI and the Mobile County District Attorney’s Office, which has charged 27 people with stealing more than $200,000 most of it financial aid. – PR 7/10/2007
• The Southern Association of Colleges and Schools accrediting organization placed Bishop State on probation.
• Three Bishop State employees and three people with family connections to those employees were charged stealing more than $75,000 in financial aid. The U.S. Department of Education put the 4,100-student college on “heightened cash monitoring” and demanded the return of $150,000 in federal aid. An outside firm was hired to overhaul the college’s financial aid office.
• An inquiry into the school by Alabama’s two-year college system found violations of federal and state financial aid policies, with aid going to ineligible students and some recipients getting excess money. The inquiry also raised questions about academics at Bishop State, where some students were said to have received high grades and credit for little or no time on class work.
• The most outrageous was the case of Pearlie Mae French, the 77-year-old, one-legged, multi-sport athlete. Bishop State records show that Ms. French was enrolled at various times from fall 2004 to the spring 2006 semester, and that she received financial aid. She was enrolled in varsity basketball, baseball and softball in the spring of 2006. This was news to her son, Anthony French Sr., who is certain that: a) his mother had one leg amputated because of diabetes, b) she died in March 2006 at the age of 77 and c) she never went to college.
• The Bishop State Community College Foundation, which has been criticized in multiple two-year system reports and investigated by law enforcement, will be shut down. – PR 9/28/07
  • A report on Bishop State by the two-year system said then-college President Yvonne Kennedy operated the foundation under her “personal direction,” against system officials’ advice. The report also said the foundation maintained no accounting records, other than a checkbook, and was never audited.
  • Mobile County District Attorney John Tyson Jr. has said he is investigating how the foundation used a $94,000 legislative grant it received in 2003 from Kennedy, who represents parts of Mobile in the state House of Representatives. Delchamps said the foundation now has about $14,700 in assets.
• Yvonne Kennedy served as president of the college from 1981 to 2007.
  • Yvonne Kennedy retired as President in 2007. She will remain at Bishop State Community College indefinitely after vacating the president’s office to write a history of Bishop State. She will become “president emeritus,” a designation giving her neither pay, according to Bradley Byrne, who has said that Kennedy requested the title. At retirement, Kennedy will be eligible to collect a lump sum of about $530,000 accumulated through the state’s deferred retirement option program and approximately $7,600 in monthly pension.
• A fired Bishop State Community College instructor, who documents show enrolled as a student in classes that he taught, must be returned to his job with back-pay, an arbitrator decided. Since the food service teacher, Henry Douglas, had already received a letter of reprimand from Bishop State for enrolling in the classes, the school’s termination was an additional punishment for the same situation and therefore unfair, the arbitrator found. Bradley Byrne, chancellor of the Alabama Community College System, criticized the ruling, which he said was the result of the state’s Fair Dismissal Act, teacher tenure protections and the Alabama Education Association. In February 2007, the Press-Register reported that documents showed Douglas enrolled as a student in at least seven classes he taught, receiving six grades of A and one B for those courses. Kennedy’s successor as president, James Lowe, had decided rather than being suspended, Douglas and Packer should be fired.