Marty McRae will lead Baldwin County Public Schools on a permanent basis, after the Board of Education voted Thursday to remove the interim tag from the man who has spent his entire 36-year career in the district.
The vote capped a short but closely watched search. McRae, who had been running the system in an acting capacity since Eddie Tyler’s retirement took effect at the end of June, was chosen over Tony McGee, the superintendent of Mississippi’s Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District. The two men were the only finalists, and both sat for interviews with the board earlier in the week before members made their decision during Thursday night’s meeting.
A career built entirely in Baldwin County
McRae’s resume is unusually deep for a sitting superintendent, and almost every line of it was written in Baldwin County. He began his career as a mathematics teacher and coach at Fairhope High School, moved into school administration as an assistant principal there in 2004, and then served as principal of Spanish Fort High School from 2010 to 2015. Since then he has worked at the district level, first as the system’s athletic director and later as an assistant superintendent overseeing secondary education from 2015 to 2022, a job that put him in charge of supervising and evaluating the principals of every middle and high school in the county.
Most recently, McRae served as assistant superintendent of Prevention and Support and Student Services. That portfolio touched nearly every corner of the district’s non-instructional operations: transportation, child nutrition, attendance, alternative education, after-school programs, counseling and health services. He also drove the rollout of districtwide safety initiatives, including expanded camera systems, panic-alert devices for employees and standardized emergency response protocols.
He holds a bachelor’s degree from Auburn University at Montgomery and a master’s degree in education from the University of South Alabama, along with administrative certification and a credential from the university’s Superintendent Academy, which he completed in 2020.
Following a longtime leader
McRae steps into the role held for more than a decade by Eddie Tyler, who announced his retirement in March after a half-century in public education, the last eleven of them leading Baldwin County’s schools. Tyler’s last day was June 30, and McRae served as interim superintendent in the weeks between Tyler’s departure and Thursday’s vote.
Succeeding a popular incumbent is rarely simple, and board members acknowledged the weight of the decision. Several residents addressed the board before the vote, urging members to think about the long-term consequences of their choice. One speaker told the board that every child, teacher and family in the county would feel the effects of the decision for years to come.
Board member Andrea Lindsey said the district is in a strong position but expects the new superintendent to keep pushing. Board member Jason Woerner, who backed McRae, pointed to the breadth of his district-level experience as the deciding factor. Each promotion, Woerner said, represented greater responsibility and greater accountability, and McRae’s work was never confined to a single school building. Instead, it expanded to overseeing operations that affect students every day, from secondary education and transportation to child nutrition, student services, school safety and alternative education.
The rival from Mississippi
The board’s other finalist was not a local candidate. Tony McGee has led the Starkville-Oktibbeha Consolidated School District in Mississippi, where he has steered a roughly $100 million project to build a new high school, one of the most expensive public education construction projects in Mississippi’s history. That experience made him a serious contender for a district that is itself scrambling to build schools fast enough to keep pace with enrollment.
In the end, though, the board went with continuity. McRae had a long list of Baldwin County educators and administrators vouch for him, and his institutional knowledge of the system — its campuses, its growth corridors and its culture — was difficult to match from the outside.
Honored, and promising partnership
McRae described himself as deeply honored to take the job, and said Baldwin County is a special place that must be preserved even as the district works to become one of the most competitive in the state.
He told the community that the district is in the process of setting its goals and that staff and parents will hear more about them in the weeks ahead. He was explicit that he cannot do the work without the buy-in of the county’s communities and parents, and asked families to partner with him in keeping the school system at the level residents expect and deserve.
After the vote, McRae was more casual. He said he was excited for Baldwin County, a place he called wonderful, and said the district wants to continue a tradition that has been many years in the making.
Growth is the first test
McRae has already identified what he considers his first challenge: keeping up with the county’s explosive residential growth. Baldwin County is one of the fastest-growing counties in Alabama, and its school system serves more than 30,000 students with roughly 4,500 employees spread across the county from Fairhope and Spanish Fort to Gulf Shores, Bay Minette and the communities in between.
That growth translates directly into demand for classrooms. McRae said the district is trying to find land and build schools to provide opportunities for the children who keep arriving, a blunt acknowledgment that enrollment pressure will shape budget decisions, attendance zones and construction plans throughout his tenure.
The district’s new leader also inherits a system that has been through an unusual stretch of leadership churn at the top. Tyler led the district through the pandemic years and a period of rapid capital expansion, and his retirement created the district’s first open superintendent’s seat in more than a decade. McRae’s two weeks as interim leader, short as they were, gave the board a live audition of how he would run the office; the permanent appointment removes any remaining question about direction.
McRae’s appointment is effective immediately. The district’s more than 30,000 students returned to classrooms for the new school year in August under a leader who, for the first time in more than a decade, came up through Baldwin County’s own classrooms rather than arriving from elsewhere.
For parents and teachers, the message from the boardroom was continuity plus ambition. The system’s traditions, McRae said, are worth preserving, and the people who built them are being asked to help carry them forward. The work of matching that ambition to the realities of one of Alabama’s fastest-growing counties begins now.