Angie Swiger has resigned from the Baldwin County Board of Education, stepping down from the District 5 seat she has held for nine years just as a legal fight over her eligibility to keep serving was headed to a judge.
Swiger submitted her letter of resignation on Dec. 5, ending months of uncertainty about her status on the county board after Gulf Shores voters moved earlier this year to break away and form their own municipal school system. Officials with Baldwin County Schools had asked the Alabama Attorney General’s office to weigh in on whether a board member living inside the boundaries of a newly created city school district could continue to represent a county board seat, and a judge had been expected to rule on the question before Swiger’s decision made it moot.
In her resignation letter, Swiger said she had grown weary of questions about where her loyalties lay as Gulf Shores worked through the process of separating from the county system. She said she had always tried to serve District 5 as a whole, a sprawling area that includes Gulf Shores, Orange Beach, Elberta, Fort Morgan and Ono Island, but acknowledged that her ties to Gulf Shores ultimately shaped her decision to step aside.
“Although I have served all areas of my district effectively and equitably, my passion, commitment, love, and support for my Gulf Shores community, its citizens, and its children is no secret,” Swiger wrote. “After a great deal of thought and consideration, I have come to the conclusion that my heart truly lies in my city and I have completed the job that 61% of the Gulf Shores voters elected me twice to do.”
Swiger pointed to a list of initiatives she said she helped shepherd during her tenure, including plans for a new high school in Elberta, a 1:1 technology program spanning kindergarten through 12th grade in the Gulf Shores and Orange Beach feeder pattern, and a foreign language curriculum that begins in first grade. She also cited the creation of ten college and career academies in the south end of the county, a program she said drew more than 400 visitors and praise from state education officials and has since been modeled by other school systems around the country.
Among the other accomplishments she listed was a dual enrollment partnership with Coastal Alabama Community College that gives students access to 13 different college-level courses in academic and career-technical fields. She also pointed to a partnership with South Baldwin Regional Medical Center that opened a full-time teaching facility in Orange Beach for the district’s Health Sciences Academy, along with collaborations with the cities of Gulf Shores and Orange Beach that created student pathways in fire science, criminal justice, emergency medical services, horticulture, engineering and the arts.
Swiger said that when she was first elected, her goal was to help build a school system strong enough that no community within it would ever want to leave. She said she had spent the past two years trying to find common ground between the county system and the island communities pushing for separation, but that Gulf Shores ultimately made its own decision to move forward with a standalone system.
“At the end of the day, Gulf Shores has made the final decision to form a separate system and we must all move on from there,” she wrote.
Gulf Shores voters approved splitting from Baldwin County Schools earlier this year, and the city has since been laying the groundwork for its own school board and administration, with officials targeting a 2018 opening for city-run schools. Baldwin County Schools Superintendent Eddie Tyler has publicly questioned whether that timeline is realistic given the amount of work involved in dividing assets, staff and facilities between the two systems.
Swiger thanked the Baldwin County Schools staff she worked alongside for nearly a decade and said she was confident that Board President Cecil Christenberry and Superintendent Tyler would move quickly to find a replacement for her seat. She said she expected whoever fills the District 5 position to continue serving the children of Baldwin County and the district with transparency and integrity.
Her resignation leaves the Baldwin County Board of Education to determine how to fill the vacant seat while the county and Gulf Shores continue working through the logistics of separating into two independent school systems.