Marietta High School names new principal

Marvin Crumbs has been tapped as the new principal of Marietta High School. The 52-year-old career educator will lead the 2,661 student body and 165 faculty of Marietta High School when the new school year starts.

Crumbs had been the principal of Columbus High School, one of the top-ranked public schools in Georgia, for more than a decade.

Following a recommendation from Superintendent Grant Rivera’s recommendation to hire Crumbs, the Marietta Board of Education voted unanimously to approve his hiring. Combs started work on June 1.

As many school systems have seen a revolving door on superintendents, Marietta High has seen a revolving door on principals. Crumbs’ will be the 4th principal of Marietta High in a year.

– In June 2022, the board voted to transfer Keith Ball to a central office position after he had spent four years helming the school.
– The following month, the board voted to hire Eric Holland, then principal of Rome High School, as the new MHS principal. Six weeks later Holland resigned and returned to Rome to accept a superintendent job there.
– The district’s chief human resources officer, DeMarcos “Marco” Holland (no relation to Eric Holland), was named interim principal for the remainder of the 2022-2023 school year.

For Crumbs, he hopes to spend the rest of his career in Marietta saying, “I’m definitely in it for the long haul. I’m in it for the right reasons.I like consistency. I was in Muscogee County for 29 years. I was at Columbus High school for 12 years. I was at Richards Middle School for 11 years. … I don’t want to work past 62, so I would love to be here for 10 years.”

Combs says that the essentials to any successful school are teachers who feel supported and that he inherited a great faculty with Marietta High and wants to keep them. “Everything we do is for students,” he said. “We turn the lights on for students, we schedule for students. We crank up the bus for students. Everything we do is for students. But it’s being done by adults who need support, and they need to know that we care about it.”

Crumbs says he plans to do a lot of listening, observing, and questioning and doesn’t plan to shake things up too quickly, believing that forcing wholesale changes too quickly can be a recipe for failure. “Unless there’s some situation where an organization is in dire straits. … That is not the case here. I mean, more than anything, the stakeholders in Marietta just need consistency,” Crumbs said.

Crumbs was born and raised in the tiny town of Cuthbert, Georgia by a mother who had an eighth-grade education and a grandmother who had no formal education. Of his family upbringing he said, “But they raised two kids who went on to get college educations, advanced degrees. “It was always important in our household, their appreciation for education and all the things that it would bring to you.”

Crumbs attended Randolph-Clay High School in Randolph County. After graduation, he went to Columbus State University and earned a bachelor’s in health sciences and a master’s in middle grades education from Columbus State University. He received a specialist degree in elementary education from Troy University and a doctorate in education administration from Argosy University.

Crumbs’ first teaching job came in 1995 at Richards Middle in Columbus, as a social studies teacher. His first role as a principal came at Baker Middle, also in Columbus.

Strong local news has the ability to educate us as citizens, connect us as people, and empower us as communities. SPOTLIGHT South Cobb News has been serving our community in this role since 2021. Please help us fund the important work of SPOTLIGHT by making a contribution today.