Photo by Jon Anderson.
Hoover school board member Amy Mudano listens during her final board meeting at the Farr Administration Building in Hoover on May 9.
Hoover Board of Education member Amy Mudano said she definitely believes her votes in favor of requiring masks in Hoover schools at the beginning of the 2021-22 school year are what kept her from getting reappointed to the school board this year.
She initially applied for reappointment for a second five-year term but withdrew in April before interviews with the Hoover City Council, saying a majority of the council did not want to reappoint her and already had their minds made up on another candidate.
“I feel like it’s a shame,” Mudano said. “A little bit of politics made its way into those [mask] decisions. I don’t think that was very helpful.”
Mudano was one of three school board members who voted in favor of requiring masks for the first 30 days of school in August 2021 and voted to extend the mask requirement in September due to COVID-19 case rates.
The school board voted unanimously to rescind the mask mandate in February 2022, but mask opponents took note of which school board members voted in favor of them initially.
Mudano said the school board was faced with an unprecedented problem.
“I feel like we didn’t get a lot of guidance from the state or county health department,” she said. “They left it up to local boards, and nobody knew the best or right thing to do.”
Guidance from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and state health department was not always the same, she said.
Mudano, who at the time was a research associate and epidemiologist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, said she talked with specialists in infectious disease and tried to make the best decision she could based on the advice of experts.
One of the toughest parts of being a school board member is knowing you can’t make everybody happy, she said.
While school board members didn’t always agree on everything, she believes they worked well together as a whole. They are very different people with different personalities, she said. Some think more with emotion, and some think more analytically, but it worked together to produce a great board, she said.
And she also knows the City Council has every right to choose whomever they want to be on the school board, she said.
Mudano said she learned a lot in five years and remains very impressed with the quality of administrators, teachers and staff in Hoover schools and dedication they have to serve children.
She was pleased to be a part of some important decisions, including capital projects such as the expansion of Berry Middle School, ongoing construction of a new theater at Hoover High and upcoming renovation of the theater at Spain Park High.
The partnership with the city of Hoover to add artificial turf on school baseball and softball fields shows the two entities can work together, and “I hope there’s more of that in the future,” she said.
She also would like to see more progress by the school system in getting released from the decades-old federal desegregation court case in Jefferson County, she said. There was some momentum toward that early in her tenure, but that momentum was lost, she said.
She believes all Hoover schools have similar programs and facilities that give all kids the best possible opportunities for success, regardless of race, she said. She would recommend any Hoover school to anyone, she said.
Mudano also is proud that Hoover students showed less academic decline during the COVID-19 pandemic than the average student nationally and have made uncommon gains since returning full-time to the classroom. She does, however, hope school officials continue to find more ways to help struggling students, she said.
The school board also must continue to keep an eye on safety and security, prepare for the departure of Superintendent Dee Fowler and perhaps start having conversations again about a third high school, she said.
Other school board members thanked Mudano for her service. Board member Amy Tosney said Mudano, while very different from herself, brought a lot to the table and was a great board member.
