Kingsport-born Mark Musick, who is president of the Southern Regional Education Board, will be the spring commencement speaker at ETSU on Saturday, May 4. Graduation exercises begin at 10 a.m. in Memorial Center.The Southern Regional Education Board, headquartered in Atlanta, is America’s first interstate compact for education. Its members include the governor of each of the 16 member states, legislators, educators, and other citizen leaders.

ETSU President Dr. Paul E. Stanton Jr. is one of the four Tennessee members of the board appointed by the governor, and he serves on the board’s Executive Committee.

Mark Musick was selected as SREB president in 1989 after serving as vice-president of the board and working primarily with southern state legislators, governors, and higher education boards as well as their staffs.

Prior to his association with SREB, Musick served in the Virginia governor’s office and with the State Board for Community Colleges and the Virginia Council of Higher Education.

During his more than two decades of involvement with SREB’s efforts to improve quality in Southern schools and colleges, Musick counts among the organization’s milestones a 1981 report, The Need for Quality, which spelled out specific recommendations that many Southern states adopted well before national attention to educational improvement and the Nation at Risk report emerged.

He also cites Goals for Edu-cation: Challenge 2000 in which SREB put forward educational goals for the South in 1988 that influenced subsequent actions by South-ern states and the actions by all states as national education goals were established the following year.

During the 1980s, Musick directed a project affiliated with the National Assessment which produced for the first time student achievement information that could be legitimately compared from state to state.

Musick graduated as valedictorian and president of his class at Gate City High School in Scott County, Va., and he was selected by the Kingsport Times-News as the outstanding high school senior for East Tennessee and Southwest Virginia.

As a scholarship student at Virginia Tech, Musick earned membership in Phi Eta Sigma, a national society recognizing students with grade point averages above 3.5, and he served as president of ODK, a national leadership organization.

He was president of his class and Virginia Tech’s Man of the Year.

Musick earned undergraduate and graduate degrees in history and was selected as one of five Governor’s Commonwealth Interns in 1970.

A first-generation college graduate, Musick is the son of the late Henry Musick, a native of Appalachia, Va., and Mary Foster Musick, a Kingsport native.

Musick has been married to Judy Johnston Musick for 32 years, and they live in Atlanta. The couple has two children.

Author