Tag: Antonio Parkinson

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Politics Politics Feature

GOP’s Lee Puts His Hat In

Shelby County got a look on Tuesday at Franklin businessman Bill Lee, who formally announced his run for the 2018 governor’s race over the weekend and embarked on what he called a “95-county, 95-day RV tour” of the state.

Lee had acknowledged the likelihood of his candidacy when he appeared, along with other gubernatorial propects, at the Shelby County Republican Party’s Lincoln Day banquet in February. While in Memphis, he met with reporters and pursued a schedule that included a stop at the Memphis Shelby Crime Commission and a visit with Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson, among other local meetings.

“Basically, I’m on a listening tour,” Lee said. His personal bio includes lifetime residence on a cattle farm and management of a company that deals in heating, air conditioning, plumbing, and home improvements. He says he wants to focus on growing jobs and paying attention to overdue rural needs, all while avoiding the expedient of raising taxes.

So far, only Lee and former state director of economic development Randy Boyd, among Republicans, have made official announcements, but other likely GOP gubernatorial candidates are state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, state House Speaker Beth Harwell of Nashville, and Congresswoman Diane Black of Gallatin.

So far, former Nashville Mayor Karl Dean is the only declared Democratic candidate, though state House Minority Leader Craig Fitzhugh of Ripley is considered a probable entry.

• This week’s Flyer editorial, (p. 10), makes reference to a press conference scheduled for Thursday at the National Civil Rights Museum on behalf of the Lynching Sites Project of Memphis, a nonprofit group whose efforts are coordinated with those of the Equal Justice Initiative, a national organization.

In tandem with the press conference, which relates to the project’s plans to create memorials for victims of lynching (numbering in the neighborhood of 40, according to publicist Howard Robertson), the project has announced a memorial event for one of the victims, Ell Persons, “a 49-year-old black man accused without evidence of murdering Antoinette Rappel, a 16-year-old white girl.”

That event, an “interfaith prayer ceremony,” will take place on May 21st at 3 p.m., “near the site of Summer Avenue and the Wolf River,” where the lynching, not a hanging but a burning at the stake, took place exactly 100 years earlier.

Participants will include representatives of white and black churches, the NAACP, and other individuals and institutions. The public is invited, said Robertson.

• The first of six “community forums” scheduled as part of the effort to re-establish an official Shelby County Democratic Party will take place on Saturday at noon at Black Market Strategies at 5146 Stage Road. The host for that event will be state Representative Antonio Parkinson.

A second event, at 6 p.m. on May 3rd, will be held at the Gallery at 1819 Madison, co-hosted by the Shelby County Young Democrats and the College Democrats. There will be a third forum at the Pickering Center in Germantown on Tuesday, May 9th, hosted by the Germantown Democrats, and a final forum will be held at 6 p.m. on May 15th, at Abyssinian Baptist Church, 3890 Millbranch, under the sponsorship of the Democratic Women of Shelby County.

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News The Fly-By

New Law Loosens Drug Possession Penalties

A person convicted six times of driving under the influence will now face a Class C felony in Tennessee. Meanwhile, those possessing a half-ounce or less of marijuana will be charged with a misdemeanor regardless of the number of previous possession charges on their record.

Gov. Bill Haslam signed House Bill 1478, sponsored by Rep. William Lamberth (R-Cottontown), into law last week. The new law, which will go into effect July 1st, creates a three- to-15-year prison sentence and fines up to $10,000 for drunk drivers and eases repercussions for simple possession of any drug, including cocaine and heroin. It may signal a perception shift regarding drug sentencing in the state.

“In 2014, we had 1,904 people arrested [in Tennessee] on small amounts of marijuana possession,” said Rep. Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis), a co-sponsor of the bill. “That’s a lot of loss of jobs and opportunities. If you had one blunt or one gram of weed over a half-ounce, you could face the same sentence as someone would for killing someone.”

Nearly half of the country has legalized medicinal marijuana, and four states have legalized weed for recreational use. Tennessee passed a law in 2014 that allowed seizure patients access to cannabis oil, but they must travel across state lines to obtain it. Co-sponsors of HB 1478 hope the legislation will bolster dialogue that furthers medicinal access and saves taxpayer money by reducing incarceration.

“We discovered the state was spending $1.7 million per year for [incarcerating people for] a half-ounce or less of marijuana,” said Rep. Harold Love (D-Nashville), who also co-sponsored the bill. “I think this bill will change the perception of how we deal with drug sentencing, treatment, and addiction in Tennessee. I’m not suggesting in any way that this is the gateway to legalizing marijuana, but I do think it helps with sentencing.”

Though people of all races smoke pot, arrests tend to disproportionately affect African Americans. Eighty-three percent of Shelby County’s drug possession arrests in 2010 were of African Americans, the American Civil Liberties Union found. More so, states spent more than $3.6 billion in marijuana possession enforcement.

Using marijuana can also result in a violation of probation or parole in Tennessee. Some judges will revoke or raise a person’s bail if they screen positive for marijuana, says Josh Spickler, executive director of Just City. This contributes, Spickler says, to about 35 percent of state prison admissions being the result of parole violations.

“This law is a step in the right direction, but we need to take a comprehensive look at drug laws and enforcement in Tennessee,” Spickler says.

If Tennessee were to restructure marijuana laws, Parkinson said there would be a socioeconomic benefit for the state.

“My goal next year is to remove the automatic intent to distribute for an ounce of marijuana or less out of the law,” Parkinson said. “I would like to legalize both medicinal and recreational marijuana and base it on Tennessee growers. We’re an agricultural state. I would like to see our state capitalize on an industry that can help people medicinally. We should [also] legalize it and put that money toward education.”

Like drug courts as an alternative to jail cells, Love said medicinal marijuana could potentially become a pain management option to combat prescription drug addiction.

“I’m not on the side that says legalize and tax it,” Love said. “I’m on the side that says, ‘How can we help people who are in pain be relieved without an addictive drug in their system?’ But the reason it’s important is students would lose their financial aid, and people might not be able to apply for jobs — all because they had a felony on their record for a half-ounce or less. ‘Or less’ is half of a joint. ‘Or less’ is a quarter. ‘Or less’ could be residue.”

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Politics Politics Feature

Break in the Weather

The political situation, locally as well as statewide, might appear to be in something of a lull, but the apparent calm could well presage something of a storm.

That would certainly seem to be the case at this week’s committee meetings on Wednesday of the Shelby County Commission, where at least two of the agenda items are sure to generate sparks.

One is a referred-back-to-committee item on funding the Shelby County District attorney general’s office to deal with car and body cameras employed by law enforcement; the other is a Shelby County Schools audit report and a discussion of SCS’ capital improvement needs. 

The request by D.A. Amy Weirich‘s office for $143,378 to pay for “additional personnel and equipment to process in-car and body-worn cameras” got a turndown two weeks ago by what amounted to a skeleton crew of commission members meeting under the rubric of the commission’s law enforcement committee.

It fared little better when presented to the full commission at last Monday’s regular public meeting. Though there were advocates to go ahead with the funding matter, there was significant opposition as well, particularly relating to the body-cam issue, which turned out to have enough jurisdictional, philosophical, and fiscal overtones to justify a 10-1 vote for another committee go-over — this one sure to be more fully attended.

The SCS matters are sure also to generate some close attention as the commission swings into the initial stages of its budget season. This is especially so, given the school district’s emergency request for an additional $40 million to stave off Draconian cuts, accompanied by some heated exchanges back and forth between the commission and the SCS administration and board.

• The 2016 legislative session of the Tennessee General Assembly is formally over, but questions regarding what it did and didn’t do are still provoking serious — and, in some cases, heated — reactions.

Mary Mancini, the chair of the Tennessee Democratic Party, scheduled a press conference for Tuesday of this week “to discuss the recently ended legislative session and the upcoming elections.”

According to Spencer Bowers, the TNDP communications director, actions to be discussed (which is to say, deplored) at the event, scheduled for the steps of the War Memorial Building, include the passage of a bill allowing professional counselors to reject gay and transgendered clients on the basis of “sincerely held principles” and another allowing college and university employees to carry weapons on campus, along with Governor Bill Haslam‘s refusal to veto the bills. The agenda for the Democrats’ press conference also included mention of an expanded list of Democratic candidates running in congressional races and in legislative races across the state, to challenge the Republicans’ current super-majority status in the General Assembly.

On Wednesday, three prominent Shelby County Republican members of that selfsame General Assembly will present their own takes on the legislature’s deeds, misdeeds, actions, and omissions at a noon luncheon of the National Federation of Independent Business at Regents Bank on Poplar Avenue.

The legislators are state Senate Majority Leader Mark Norris of Collierville, Senate Judiciary Committee chairman Brian Kelsey of Germantown, and House Education Committee chair Mark White of Memphis. The trio will surely have both satisfactions and disappointments in the wake of the late session. Their complaints are likely to be in an opposite direction from those of Mancini and the Democrats.

• There is, however, one lament in which the official statements of the two parties are close to being on the same page. This is in regards to the matter of Measurement, Inc., the North Carolina company entrusted with preparing and grading testing materials for the state’s new TNReady program of student/teacher evaluations.

Days after public statements by Haslam disparaging the performance of Measurement, Inc., the Tennessee Department of Education revoked its contract with the company, which failed to generate workable materials for online testing and then failed to deliver printed testing materials as well, for any but grades 9 through 12.

In a press conference at the Raleigh legislative office, state Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis), state Senate Minority Leader Lee Harris (D-Memphis), and SCS School Board member Stephanie Love slammed the unreadiness of the TNReady program. Parkinson called for a three-year extension of the current moratorium on expansion of the state’s Achievement School District and for scrapping of any official testing procedure until a satisfactory one might be developed.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Memphis Schools: ASD or iZone?

The educational reforms proposed and overseen by the Haslam administration statewide have been both well-intentioned and internally flawed. There is no question that too many public schools in Tennessee qualified for

the adjective “failing” in 2011 when Governor Bill Haslam, then newly inaugurated, appointed new state education officials dedicated to pursuing new policies.

Those policies were heavily reliant on standardized testing of student performance, teacher effectiveness, and institutional outcomes, and have met with significant resistance from several sectors of the population that, to say the least, had not previously operated in tandem.

Classroom teachers saw their influence over the educational process reduced by the General Assembly’s simultaneous abolition of collective bargaining, and many of them objected also to the intensified testing regimens mandated by the state, complaining, among other things, that training students for the tests took up time and energy that could be more usefully applied to exploratory teaching methods, that the tests, by concentrating on relatively rote outcomes in specific areas (English and math, normally) shortcut the aims of public education, and that the tests did not measure real learning.

The standardization of the tests, especially under the rubric of Common Core, also earned the distrust of parts of the state’s population who imagined that sinister national forces might be attempting to brainwash young Tennesseans. The two kinds of resistance coalesced into a group of unlikely political bedfellows that forced the state to rethink its commitment to Common Core and to develop a more Tennessee-specific standard.

Another phase of Tennessee’s new educational policy — the creation of a state-run Achievement School District empowered to take over under-performing schools from the jurisdiction of local school districts — has also met with resistance. This has particularly been the case here in Memphis, which had 69 local schools on the ASD’s “priority” list of institutions that tested in the lower five percent of effectiveness. Of those 69 schools, 31 are among the 33 that have been taken over by ASD, and ASD officials announced last week that another four — Caldwell-Guthrie Elementary, Kirby and Raleigh-Egypt middle schools and Hillcrest High — are due for takeover in the academic year 2015-16 and conversion to charter schools.

State policy permits other options, including leaving the schools under the jurisdiction of Shelby County Schools’ iZone (Innovation Zone) program. At a press conference last week, state Representative Antonio Parkinson (D-Memphis) brandished a recent Vanderbilt University study showing that iZone schools have achieved better results than have schools administered as charters or more directly by ASD. He promised to introduce legislation in the forthcoming session of the General Assembly to limit or abolish ASD’s prerogatives. 

Such legislation will probably have little chance of passing, but Parkinson’s threat should not be regarded as idle. Sentiment against ASD’s procedures continues to build among proponents of locally controlled education, who note that SCS and iZone, unlike ASD, are responsive to an elected school board. Given the results of the Vanderbilt study, it becomes harder and harder to justify authoritarian state policies that override the long-established democratic basis of public education.