It looked like the City of Germantown would have to get along a little longer without the “three Gs.” That’s another way of referring to the three schools — Germantown Elementary School, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown High School — that are geographically situated in Germantown proper but belong, administratively, to the Shelby County Schools system.
That was before Germantown’s own Senator Brian Kelsey, who represents the elite suburb (and much of East Memphis), pulled off some sleight of hand.
The 3 Gs are also called “heritage” schools by Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo and other residents of the city of Germantown, which surrendered them to SCS in 2013 but now wants them back — the buildings, anyhow, if not the students, the great majority of whom live in unincorporated Shelby County.
Identical bills that would force Shelby county Schools to hand the three schools over to the Germantown School District came before separate chambers of the Tennessee General Assembly on Wednesday. The state Senate heard co-sponsor John Stephens (R-Murfreesboro) present the Senate version of the bill, S898, and Mark White (R-Memphis), the House Education chair and the primary sponsor, had dibs on his version (HB917) in the House Election Administration Committee.
After a spirited debate, presided over by Kelsey, the Senate Education Chair, SB 898 was rejected by a 4 to 5 vote. Minutes later, the House bill was rolled (i.e., postponed for a week) by White. Germantown’s bid for the three schools seemed to have been stopped cold.
But later, after a brief recess in his Senate committee, during which he touched base with fellow Republican members he thought ought to be sympathetic to the bill, Kelsey reconvened the committee and brought to the floor a different bill, one sponsored by himself, SB 924.
The measure was what is called a caption bill, one so broad that it would end up being defined by whatever amendment got added to it. What Kelsey had done in the meantime was literally cut-and-paste, taking the key amendment off the bottom of the now discarded SB898 and attaching it, whole, to SB 924.
The newly fattened caption bill then passed in the reconvened Senate Education Committee by a 6 to 3 vote.
What the bill does, as amended, is require any school district which administers schools that are located in another district to come to terms with the geographical host district about transferring them. The bill provides for an interval, during which the means for arranging the transfer would be worked out between the two districts.
The bottom line, should the bill become law, is that Germantown Elementary, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown High School, will all, within a designated time frame, cease to be SCS schools and become part of the Germantown School District.
But, as was pointed out by those testifying against the bill in committee — who included Tony Thompson, lobbyist for SCS, and state Senator Raumesh Akbari (D-Memphis) — the great majority of the students at the three schools would have to relocate to wherever space can be found in the overcrowded SCS schools nearest them.
In 2013, when the six outer municipalities of Shelby County broke away from the newly merged city/county school district and formed their own school districts, it was made clear that Germantown did not want to educate those non-resident students. The city just wanted the buildings. “A point of pride,” is how it was termed on Wednesday by Mayor Palazzolo, who acknowledged that the buildings, if returned, might be put to some other use than as public schools.
In the settlement of 2013, SCS retained use of the three buildings as just that — public schools. The city of Germantown, meanwhile, built another elementary school and proclaimed Houston High School, on its eastern perimeter, as the high school to serve its own population.
The Senate version of the bill, SB 924, will now go to the Senate floor for action there. More details as they emerge.
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