Meet the Hoover school board’s newest member: Rex Blair

By JON ANDERSON

Greystone resident Rex Blair takes his seat on the Hoover Board of Education on June 1. Blair, 47, is replacing Amy Mudano, whose five-year term ended May 31. Blair is the regional operations director for DaVita, a kidney care company, overseeing more than 150 employees at 14 dialysis centers in the greater Birmingham area.

He has two children who already have graduated from Spain Park, two attending there now and two more at Berry Middle School.

Before joining DaVita, Blair served 2½ years with SS&C Health, a financial services and health care technology company, and spent 20 years in the U.S. Army, retiring as a lieutenant colonel. He has a bachelor’s degree in engineering physics from the U.S. Military Academy at West Point and a master’s degree from Harvard University in applied physics. Blair also was an assistant professor of physics at West Point.

The Hoover Sun sat down with Blair recently to find out more about him and his views on school system issues. Here are excerpts from that interview:

Q: Why did you decide to apply for the Hoover school board?

A: I like being involved in making a difference in things. … I’ve got the military background of managing lots of people from lots of places, from all walks of life. I’ve got the educational background. I even taught at West Point for three years, where I was the course director for 1,000 cadets for introduction to physics, so I feel like I kind of cut my teeth a little bit from the education side. Health care has taught me a lot about the P&L [profit and loss] side, the finance side. I’ve had to manage big budgets and understand we have limited resources, so as I thought through all that and how it applied to a school system. What better way to get involved in something that’s helping to shape not just your children, but the children of this community? I’m back in this community. I’m going to stay in this community, and this felt like one of the most immediate ways I can get engaged and use my experiences and helping make sure this community stays strong … and how we educate our children and set them up for success.

Q: What do you see are the biggest issues facing the school system?

A: When you look at the numbers that the high schools have, Spain Park is over 1,500, and I think Hoover High is near 2,500, roughly. Those are pretty large high school populations. … So I worry about overcrowding. I’ve seen school systems as I’ve traveled around the country where you have very bad teacher-to-student ratios, and I’ve been at ones where you have very good, and not surprisingly, the better the student-teacher ratio, the better performance students had because the teachers have the opportunity to be engaged individually with those students. … The second part is how do we retain and bring in talent? My understanding is we lost some talent during

COVID. … Are we losing people, and if so, why? And are we able to bring in the top-tier teachers in the area, and if not, why?

Q: You previously mentioned concerns about external pressures on the school system as it relates to divisive topics. Can you elaborate?

A: I think we need to be careful about anybody from any side trying to come in and change curriculum for the sake of an issue that doesn’t relate specifically to helping the students be educated. … I’m always leery of anything that sounds inflammatory. I think schools are more about — how do we make sure our students are set up for success to compete, not just with our students here in the United States, but globally. I would rather us focus on how are we doing in terms of preparing our students in English, history, math, science — in those basic subjects — compared to other folks who are around the world? Anything that distracts us from making sure our children are competitive in this global economy, that’s what I’m leery of.

Q: Superintendent Dee Fowler has made it known he likely will depart in about a year. What does Hoover need in its next superintendent?

A: I think Dr. Fowler’s done a great job. I think he’s really been a rock for us right now, especially through COVID. … I’d love to kind of get another Dr. Fowler. … How do we have someone with that growth mindset of you’re not just coming in to manage something? We’ve got to continue to grow and then be excited about it. … Are they strategic? Do they recognize this isn’t just about managing principals, staff and students? It’s thinking big picture. It’s engaging with the community. It’s engaging with the board. It’s engaging with different stakeholders. Someone who’s operational, but we’ve got limited budgets. How are we going to get the most bang for our buck? And they have the experience on how to utilize the dollars to put them in the right place.

Q: What do you think needs to be done to get Hoover released from the federal lawsuit about desegregation?

A: All I know is what I’ve read so far. I haven’t seen anything behind the scenes. It seems pretty straightforward. It seems it’s the staff and faculty, facilities, transportation, extracurricular activities and then sometimes, there was one about disciplinary action. It isn’t clear to me where we have failed to demonstrate those things. When I look around and I look at our facilities, no matter what school you go to, the facilities look the same to me. Extracurricular, we have kids from all walks of life participating in our different sports systems, so I’d like to know where we’re not meeting that factor. Plus, transportation, goodness gracious, I think we’re pretty good about getting kids to school. So I’m confused, even if we could only knock down a few, why haven’t we? What’s been the holdup? … I believe that we have done what’s been asked. I think we’ve demonstrated that we don’t have two separate school systems. I think that’s what the original court case was about — that there was a dual system. I think we’ve integrated everyone. Our population seems to suggest that — 53 languages, all walks of life, the different percentages I saw of minority students; it makes up a very large chunk of our student population.

Q: Do you believe the Hoover school system needs more funding than it currently is getting? There has been much discussion about raising property taxes by 2.4 mills to get up to the cap of 75 mills for Hoover residents in Jefferson County.

A: I think if you’re going to raise taxes, then what you do owe the community is what is the money going for? I do believe in accountability. If we’re going to go to the community and say we need an additional millions of dollars

— whatever the 2.4 mills equates to — I think it's fair to say this percentage of it is going to go to new teacher salaries, or this percentage of it is going to go to a refurbishment of this, or this percentage is going to go to that. … And we owe them some sort of metric to demonstrate that the money was used successfully because if it’s not, then we need to reallocate the money. You can’t just go on and spend money that’s being wasted.

Q: Is there anything that you would like to see emphasized more in Hoover schools?

A: I would like to know if a student needs help, how are we attacking it? … Are there things where a student can go after school and get additional help? Maybe we can’t do it because of resources or maybe we haven’t turned that back on because of COVID. There was something like that at Berry Middle School, … and one of my students took advantage of that, and it actually helped them out a lot. …They may still be doing that. I don’t know if they are. And if they are, are they doing it at all schools? Do they have the resources at all the schools? … Are we doing the best we can to make sure we provide the students who have a desire the resources they need to be successful?

Q: If you could change one thing about Hoover schools, what would it be?

A: Technology is fantastic, and it really helped us through COVID. Anecdotally, I have seen where sometimes my kids have sat in the classroom and instead of being taught by the teacher, they were taught by a video of the teacher teaching the class. That concerns me a little bit. I know as someone who has taught physics, you can look a student in the eye and you can see comprehension or you don’t, and you can’t do that if their eyes are down looking at a computer screen. … I would want to make sure that we’re not leveraging technology so hard that we’re moving away from what makes the teacher-student relationship so important to that education.

Q: What would you like parents, students and residents of Hoover to know about you?

A: The reason I’m doing this is because I truly and genuinely want to make sure that our schools are positioned to be the best they can be for everybody. … This isn’t just some extra thing I’m doing flippantly. I gave it a lot of thought. I gave it prayer. … When something’s important enough, I think we all make decisions to step into the gap and say, ‘I’ll do it.’ It may come at a cost, but it’s so important that, if not me, then who? Will I make mistakes, or will I misstep? Yeah, because I’m human, but I’m going to bring positive intent to the role.

Q: Five years from now, what will you have wanted to accomplish in Hoover schools?

A: I would like for people when I leave, that teachers say we didn’t always agree, but we knew he cared about us and the students — and not because I always did what they liked, but because they knew that I did what I said, I meant what I said and I always was a straightshooter. … The second thing is — I’m really passionate about math and science. I have two physics degrees. It’s something I love. I think it’s important. … I don’t like that our science and math scores are lower than our history and English scores. I would like to see those gaps close.