Photo by Jon Anderson
Greystone resident Rex Blair says a few words after being appointed to the Hoover Board of Education by the Hoover City Council on Monday, April 17, 2023.
The Hoover City Council on Monday night chose Greystone resident Rex Blair to replace Amy Mudano on the Hoover Board of Education.
Mudano’s five-year term ends May 31, so Blair will begin his five-year term on June 1.
Blair, 47, 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.
Hoover Councilman Steve McClinton, chairman of the council’s Education Committee, said the council believed Blair will make a fine addition to the Board of Education because he is a graduate of Berry High School, has children at Spain Park High School and has an impressive military and physics background.
“You’ve got to have very smart people on the board to make not only decisions now but also to see what’s going to happen in the landscape down the road,” McClinton said.
All three of the candidates considered by the council are sharp people, but Blair stood out the most, McClinton said.
Blair has two children who already have graduated from Spain Park, two 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.
Blair, who moved back to Hoover in 2017, said that as he thought about applying for the school board and did research on the school system beyond what he already knew, he felt like a lot of the issues he would address as a board member were very interesting and engaging and something into which he could really pull himself.
Blair said he decided to apply for the school board because he believes his experiences in the Army, education and health care and his involvement in the community as a volunteer can help Hoover City Schools provide a premier education. He wants to help the school system plan for growth while ensuring all students will receive the best education possible, he said.
For him, the most critical issues facing the school system are: future school overcrowding; continued improvement in students’ performance; overcoming the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic; hiring and retaining the best leaders, administrators and teachers; external pressures on the school system to adopt and implement ideas that will ultimately lead to greater divisiveness among students and distract from the true purpose of the school system.
Other candidates considered by the Hoover City Council for Mudano’s seat were Ross Bridge resident Dennis Quirk and Bluff Park resident Rachael Taylor.
Mudano initially applied for reappointment but later withdrew her name from consideration, saying she had come to understand the council did not want to reappoint her and she believed the council already had made up its mind.
Read more about Blair’s interview with the Hoover City Council last week here. Also, see the complete video interview here, as well as how Blair answered 15 questions submitted by members of the public here.
Editor's note: This article was updated 10:44 p.m. to remove incorrect information about how many current Hoover school board members live in the Spain Park High School zone.
