Making a deceptively brief and low-key pitch to members of
the city council Tuesday afternoon, Mayor Willie Herenton solicited their help
in arranging a referendum on the November ballot to determine whether the city
school board should henceforth “be appointed or elected.”
Herenton further suggested to council members Myron Lowery
and Janis Fullilove, who double as members of the city Charter Commission, that
they might consider authorizing such a referendum as part of their own
forthcoming ballot initiative in November.
Absent from his presentation to the council was any hint of
the slight edge with which the mayor had first broached his proposal for
“dramatic school reform” at a press conference in the Hall of Mayors on Monday. At the heart of it was a variation on a vintage Herenton proposal, a five-member board to be appointed by the mayor and ratified, in effect, by the council.
And Herenton seemed intent Tuesday on being as ingratiating as
possible to the current council, beginning by complimenting it for having “demonstrated that
it could really make a difference in this community on some very important
fronts.” As he would put it, contrasting the current 13-member body, nine of
whose members are in their first year, with previous ones, “This is not a status
quo council. I see a different mix here.”
The mayor drew an implicit contrast, too, between the council and
the school board, which had just rejected him as a prospect for the school
superintendency and whose existence as an elected body he now proposes to
abolish. The council, on the other hand, “as that body that takes the heat for
the tax rate, ought to have greater authority and accountability for the
schools.”
Insisting that the plan he was broaching was “not about
me,” Herenton said it should be structured so as not to take effect until 2012.
“That’s when Willie Herenton is history. You follow me?”
The mayor credited a “different climate” of opinion in the
state and the nation, and factors like the No Child Left Behind Act, for his
sense that now was the time to “make these changes while we can.”
In a brief give-and-take with reporters following his
session with the council, Herenton was asked about his current opposition to the
council’s decision last week to withhold funding from Memphis City Schools. A
reporter reminded him that he had proposed just such an expedient several years
ago as a means of forcing the issue of consolidation.
“Somehow or another, you have to send a shockwave,” said
Herenton, who said, “Nobody heard me then.” Now, however, there was a different
council and a different attitude toward change in Nashville. The mayor seemed to
be inviting a different idea – that of state intervention, reminding the
reporters of what he had also mentioned to the council, that state government
under the Bredesen administration had begun to intervene directly in the
Nashville school system.
Had the mayor been functioning then, or was he functioning
now, s as a “puppetmaster?” the newsman wanted to know. “I’m not going to let
you personalize the issue. We’re trying to change the culture,” the mayor said.
