Soft-spoken Brunswick High pirate alumni, Mike Blackerby, was selected Jan. 14 to lead Glynn County Schools. He succeeds Scott Spence, who announced his departure last month. Blackerby says he sees a bright future ahead for the district, which he says is the most dynamic period in two decades.
The Glynn native never left his home county, despite working over 25 years in the neighboring Camden County School District in a litany of roles including Woodbine Elementary principal. He came home to work after spring 2021 as executive director of operations for Glynn County Schools when he decided that he wanted to work where he lived and raised his family.
He was named deputy superintendent of operations in 2024, where he handles all logistical operations in the district. After an executive session at the Dec. 17, 2024, school board meeting he was named the sole finalist to succeed current superintendent Scott Spence.
Blackerby says the quick move up was quick. “We had discussions and went through an interview process and honestly, we did not have a year’s worth of discussion,” said Blackerby.
Blackerby says that Spence has been a great mentor and they are working on establishing timelines for the transition phase which hopefully will be brought to the board in February. Spence term ends on June 30.
30,000-foot view
Blackerby forecasts three pertinent issues moving forward for the school system: implementation of the rezoning plans, teacher/staff retention and the growing numbers of English language learners.
“The biggest issues going forward are disproportionate enrollment in some of our schools, which we will have to take care of, as well as some of these plans for our new elementary school, which we’ll start construction on soon, so that’s going to necessitate rezoning,” he stated.
At a recent presentation of the provisional fall 2027 plan at St. Simons Elementary, Spence said that the school board could take up discussions on the plan as early as December. However, Blackerby said that the recommendations will not be presented to the board until at least this spring.
“After they’re presented with the plan, we’re going to open it up for public comment, the board will not take action until they get public comment over the course of not just a couple of days, but over the course of a couple sof months. So I don’t envision the board actually voting next fall,” he said.
Blackerby says that he favors the plan for its potential utility of allowing parents to get to their children if the need arises. Despite that, he expressed that students who are traveling from south of Gloucester Street to the schools on the island are not unique when it comes to traveling across district boundaries. He cites students from the ARCO subdivision who have to travel to Sterling Elementary.
Staffing
Blackerby also says the district is faced with the teacher shortage trend that is affecting the state as well as the nation at large. He believes that people simply are not going into higher education to teach anymore.
“The pool of teachers is becoming narrower and narrower and the competition to get teachers is that way and, that is a struggle right now, particularly in specialty areas, higher academic classes at the high school level, but also in special education services, you know we have to try and meet the needs of special education students,” he added. “So we got to make sure we have strategies to get teachers and give them some good students.”
Blackerby said that in the last four or five years the population of students who do not speak proficient English has grown tremendously.
“We’re now at almost 10% of our school population. In some of our elementary schools, that number is twice that. So that’s a challenge for our teachers if you don’t speak the other language,” he explained. “That’s a big one, we’ve been making some efforts to hire more teachers who are certified and trained to work with those students. But, that’s even more of a niche that we don’t have enough of those teachers available.”
What does the future look like?
As the district formulates its budget for the next fiscal year, competitive salaries are atop the priority list. Blackerby says the district is making efforts to stay “Top Three” in terms of coastal regional salaries. He acknowledges that it is a tall task to try to compete with Savannah-Chatham but he says the district can work to be in the range with counties such as Bryan, Effingham and Liberty.
“Artificial intelligence, those tools, …but we’re going to have to embrace them, and our teachers are going to have to learn how to implement them, I mean, it’s coming. We can’t ignore it,” he said.
He said the district is looking into safeguards around the tools and how to teach students how to use them appropriately.
“I’m gonna have to let go of a lot of stuff that I do on a minute-to-minute, day-to-day basis, and let other people handle a lot of that,” he said. “Because I’ll have to. So I’ll have to handle those questions and deal with issues that affect the whole school system but I’ve kind of been doing that anyway.”
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