“Excellence starts with everyone here in this room.” That was the message Murphy High School junior Everett Coleman delivered Thursday night as the Mobile County Public School System gathered at the Saenger Theatre for its annual It Starts with Us awards ceremony, an event built around celebrating students, teachers and the community partners who support them. The historic downtown Mobile theater, with its restored interior and stage house, has long been the district’s chosen venue for the evening, and this year’s edition filled it with students, educators, administrators and business leaders from across the county.
The ceremony is one of the largest annual gatherings on the district’s calendar, drawing honorees from elementary, middle and high schools spread across a system that covers the entirety of Mobile County. It is built around a simple premise: that the work of public education succeeds when classroom achievement, community investment and institutional leadership all point in the same direction, and that the people doing that work deserve public recognition at scale.
A year of numbers worth celebrating
Coleman told the crowd the district had enjoyed a “phenomenal year,” pointing to a four-year, on-time graduation rate that has climbed to 82 percent, along with $100 million in ongoing school construction projects. Both figures represent years of sustained effort across the system, which is the largest school district in Alabama and one of the largest employers in the region. The graduation rate, tracked as the percentage of students who finish high school within four years of entering ninth grade, has been a central metric for districts across the state as accountability standards have tightened.
The construction program touches campuses across the county, from new classroom wings to renovated athletic and career-technical facilities, and school leaders have described it as the most ambitious building campaign the system has undertaken in years. For neighborhoods that have watched aging schools serve generations of students, the projects represent both a physical upgrade and a signal of long-term commitment to neighborhood campuses.
The system also opened four new Signature Academies during the year: the Coastal Studies Academy at Alma Bryant High School, the Academy of International Studies at Murphy High School, Industry and Engineering at Theodore High School, and Maritime, Engineering and Entrepreneurship at Williamson High School. The academies are the latest expansion of a district-wide approach that ties high school coursework to career pathways, pairing core academics with specialized study in fields matched to the Gulf Coast economy, from coastal science and marine trades to international business and advanced manufacturing.
Each academy gives students a structured course sequence, exposure to industry partners, and a clearer line of sight from the classroom to postsecondary study or entry-level work. Alma Bryant’s coastal studies program draws on its Irington-area campus’s proximity to the bay, while Williamson’s maritime academy connects to the port, shipbuilding and engineering employers that anchor the region’s waterfront economy.
Students across the district earned a combined $72 million in college scholarships, while the county now counts 12 Blue Ribbon schools, four Torchbearer schools and 144 AP scholars. The scholarship total, compiled each spring from acceptance letters across the senior class, captures offers from universities across the country. Blue Ribbon and Torchbearer designations, meanwhile, mark state and national recognition for schools that post strong performance or dramatic gains, and the Advanced Placement scholar count reflects the district’s continued push to expand access to college-level coursework.
An evening of student performance
Entertainment throughout the evening came from the B.C. Rain High marching band, the Forest Hill Elementary Lions Choir, the Murphy High Dynamics Dance Company and the Mary G. Montgomery Jazz Band. The performances gave the ceremony its texture, filling the theater between award presentations and putting the district’s arts programs on the same stage as its academic honorees. For the young performers, many of whom had never played the Saenger’s stage, the booking itself was a recognition of the work their programs do through the year.
Three students who started with themselves
Three students received the system’s individual It Starts with Me award, the honor reserved for students whose personal initiative sets the standard the ceremony’s name describes.
Amelia Lindsay of Allentown Elementary was honored for organizing a yard sale that raised more than $1,000 for her school’s library, alongside her broader involvement in school activities and service projects. The yard sale, planned and run by a student still in elementary school, turned a weekend project into a tangible contribution to her campus, adding resources to a library that serves the entire school. Her award citation pointed to the way her service extended beyond a single event into a pattern of involvement across the school year.
Cheyenne Bliss of Cranford Burns Middle School was recognized for her work with the school’s Step Team, Scholar’s Bowl team and Builder’s Club, as well as her volunteer work with Special Olympics. The combination is a demanding one: academic competition and performance groups alongside sustained community service with athletes from across the region. Builder’s Club, a service organization with chapters in middle schools across the country, gave her a framework for the volunteer work that earned her the honor.
Semaj Bell of B.C. Rain High School was celebrated for his role in the school’s JROTC program, Drill Team and Color Guard, along with volunteer work at a local veterinary clinic. JROTC leadership roles at Rain carry real responsibility, from drill competition preparation to ceremonial duties at school and community events, and Bell’s work outside school added a service record to an already full schedule.
Seventeen additional students were recognized as It Starts with Me runners-up, each named from the stage as representatives of the initiative the district hopes to cultivate in every campus. Together the twenty honorees spanned the full grade span of the system, from elementary classrooms to high school senior halls.
Honoring the teachers
The ceremony also honored the district’s 90 Teachers of the Year, with countywide honors going to Laniese Howard of Kate Shepard Elementary and Don Jones of B.C. Rain High School. Each school in the system selects its own Teacher of the Year, and the school-level winners form the pool from which district and countywide honorees are chosen. The two countywide winners represent the endpoints of the district’s grade span, an elementary campus and a high school, and their selection put a spotlight on classrooms at both ends of the student journey.
For the 90 teachers named from their campuses, the recognition carries weight beyond the ceremony. Teacher of the Year honorees often serve on district committees, mentor new teachers, and represent their schools in programs across the system during their selection year.
Partners in the work
Mobile Infirmary Hospital was named the district’s Partner of the Year for its role in the Signature Academy of Health Careers at Blount High School, its Project Search internship program for students with special needs, and its support of student job fairs. The hospital’s partnership spans the district’s career-preparation pipeline, from classroom health-sciences coursework to workplace internships that can lead directly to employment for students who might otherwise struggle to find a first job.
Project Search, the program at the center of the hospital’s recognition, places students with disabilities in rotating internships inside a working hospital, with the goal of competitive employment at the end of the program. For the district’s special-needs population, the partnership represents one of the most direct bridges from school to career that the system has built.
A long list of other community partners also received recognition, a roster that reflected how many institutions in the Mobile area are woven into the daily work of the school system.
VT MAE was honored for its summer internships and facility tours. The aerospace maintenance company, based at Mobile Aeroplex at Brookley, gives students in the district’s technical programs a look inside an aviation maintenance operation and a pathway into one of the region’s fastest-growing industrial sectors. The internships are among the most competitive placements available to high school students in the area.
The Mobile Rotary Club was recognized for donating $150,000 toward a special-needs playground at Augusta Evans Special School, a gift that transformed the campus’s outdoor space for a student population with profound physical and developmental needs. Playground equipment designed for students with disabilities is specialized and costly, and the club’s contribution paid for facilities that the school could not have built from its own budget.
The Mobile County Emergency Management Agency was honored for keeping students safe during severe weather, a responsibility that takes on particular urgency in a county where tornado seasons bring frequent warnings and where school shelter decisions affect tens of thousands of children. The agency works with the district’s transportation and safety staff on storm tracking, shelter protocols and the timing of dismissals.
Additional honorees included Bay Chevrolet for its automotive career training partnerships, the Fuse Project for funding an after-school discipline-support program at Scarborough Middle through its Dragon Boat Race fundraiser, the Mobile Police Department for its youth outreach programs, the Mobile Area Chamber of Commerce for connecting businesses to the district’s Signature Academies, the Mobile Kappa League for mentoring more than 80 students annually, Airbus Americas Engineering Division for its work with schools along Dauphin Island Parkway, the district’s own transportation department for safely busing 26,000 students a day, and the United Way of Southwest Alabama for its academic support programs.
The district’s transportation department, honored alongside outside partners, carries one of the largest operational loads in the system: 26,000 students moved to and from school every day across a county that spans from the Mississippi line to the Eastern Shore. The department’s drivers, mechanics and routing staff manage a network that has to adapt daily to weather, traffic and road conditions across one of the largest school transportation service areas in the state.
A farewell after three careers
The evening also included a tribute to longtime MCPSS Supervisor of Public Relations Nancy Pierce, a former teacher and television news anchor who is retiring this summer after a career spanning three professions in service to the Mobile community. Pierce’s path through the classroom, the broadcast newsroom and the district’s communications office gave her a rare vantage point on the system she served, and colleagues credited her with shaping how the district tells its own story to the public it answers to.
Her retirement closes a chapter for a department that handles everything from media relations to crisis communications across a district of nearly 60,000 students, and the tribute drew one of the evening’s longest rounds of applause from an audience that included many of the educators and partners she had worked with over the years.
The ceremony closed where it began, with Coleman’s theme hanging over the Saenger’s marquee: that excellence in a school system starts with the people in the room. For one night, the room held the students who raised money for their libraries, the teachers who stayed late, the companies that opened their doors, and the staff who moved the district through another year. The work resumes with the next school bell, but the record of the year now stands on the stage where the community saw it recognized.