Tag: David Pickler

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Politics Politics Beat Blog

Voucher and De-Annexation Issues Both Headed for Showdowns

CREDIT: JB

JB

County Commissioners Steve Basar and Terry Roland during deliberations on Wednesday.

Two matters of significant importance to Memphis and Shelby County (considered both separately and as a single geographic unit) are hanging fire as of this week.

One involves the question of school vouchers, which is sure to come to a head in the state General Assembly before it adjourns in April. The other has to do with de-annexation legislation directly affecting Memphis and its suburbs, and this matter, too, is likely to have a reckoning in Nashville before session’s end.

VOUCHERS: Until this week, it seemed reasonably certain that the Shelby County Commission was prepared, on a tight deadline, to establish the machinery for appointing an interim state Representative to fill the state House vacancy created by the resignation last month of Rep. Mark Lovell in District 95 (Germantown, Collierville).

A schedule had already been prepared, calling for applications for the interim position to be made available between March 21st and March 27th, with applicants to be interviewed by the commission on March 29th and an appointment to be made during the Commission’s regular public meeting of April 3rd.

Given that the legislature has plans to adjourn sometime in April, that left little time for an interim Representative to serve. (Governor Bill Haslam had meanwhile issued a writ establishing a schedule for a special election, to be completed in a general election in June — well after the end of the current legislative session.)
The momentum for the Commission’s determination to appoint an interim successor to Lovell was the likelihood that at least one voucher bill, sponsored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), and possibly another, sponsored by state Rep. Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville), would be among the late measures still requiring a definitive vote in the waning days of the General Assembly.

The Commission had voted unanimously on February 20 to oppose voucher legislation pending in the General Assembly. The Commission’s seven Democrats, all African Americans from Memphis districts, and six Republicans, whites with constituencies in East Memphis and the suburbs, were firm on the issue.

They all saw voucher legislation, which would enable public funding for tuition at private schools, as being a threat to the financial and logistical underpinning of both the Memphis-based Shelby County Schools district and the six independent municipal districts in the suburbs.

But a complication arose over the weekend in the form of a concerted effort among various Shelby County Democrats to persuade the seven Commission Democrats to vote as a bloc to appoint prominent Germantown Democrat Adrienne Pakis-Gillon as the interim appointee from District 95.

Inasmuch as District 95 is, by some reckonings, the most dyed-in-the-wool Republican House district in the state, the GOP members of the Commission expressed concern at this possible breach of what they considered a long-standing gentlemen’s’ agreement that governmental vacancies should be filled by members of the same parties that had occupied the seats previously.

Though that tradition had been flouted once before, in the case of a vacant Commission seat, it never had been in determining interim appointees to the legislature.

Consequently, in Monday’s meeting of the Commission’s general government committee, there came a motion from Republican Commissioner Terry Roland of Millington to abandon the idea of appointing an interim successor to Lovell, leaving the District 95 seat vacant until the 2018 legislative session, come what might on vouchers in 2017.

Roland’s motion failed on a vote of 4 ayes, 4 noes, and one abstention among the committee members present, but, ominously for opponents of the voucher bills, one who supported Roland was GOP Commissioner David Reaves of Bartlett, a former School Board member who had been arguably the most determined opponent of vouchers on the Commission and who had spearheaded the unanimous anti-voucher vote of February 20.

As late as Tuesday morning, Reaves was insisting that, as he told the Flyer, “”We need to appoint somebody to represent the district.” But on Wednesday, with partisanship threatening to supplant vouchers as the issue, Reaves had begun to backtrack on the need for an interim appointee.

He had assumed, along with other Commissioners, that the gentlemen’s’ agreement would hold, and that some moderate Republican (Reaves himself suggested former School Board colleague David Pickler) would fill the void in Nashville long enough to express the will of the Commission on the voucher issue.

Now everything was in doubt, with Democrats and Republicans beginning to eye each other across the partisan divide and a showdown scheduled for Monday, March 20, when the Commission will meet again, with one last chance to begin trying to get someone up to Nashville on behalf of District 95 before legislative adjournment.

Much depends on whether, as of March 20, there is anything resembling bloc unity among the Commission’s seven Democrats on the matter of an interim appointment for Pakis-Gillon or any other Democrat.

An informal survey of the Democratic contingent by the Flyer indicates that such is not the case, that as many as three Democratic members have yet to decide on the matter, and one or two have strong doubts about the propriety of risking long-term bipartisan comity for the sake of a transitory and perhaps Pyrrhic symbolic victory.

Especially for its effect on what looms as a forthcoming extra-tight House vote on vouchers.


DE-ANNEXATION: On Thursday, the day after the inconclusive Commission vote on District 95, the aforesaid Terry Roland was on his way to Nashville, in tandem with a group of suburbanites from the South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke areas desiring to de-annex themselves from Memphis.

The point, as Commissioner Roland explained it, was to force more or less immediate action on a de-annexation measure in the face of what appears to be a dilatory attitude by the Memphis City Council toward acting on a home-grown de-annexation alternative offered up recently by a joint city-county task force.

“They don’t want to wait around until 2020 or 2021 when the Council might or might not have got something done on the task force plan,” Roland said, referring to a “rightsizing” initiative prepared to the City Council last month by Caissa Public Strategies on behalf of the Strategic Footprint Review Task Force, the ad hoc city/county body created to explore formulas for potential voluntary de-annexations.

That report cited six areas considered suitable for de-annexation via City Council action. Several of the areas were large but thinly inhabited land masses where the cost of providing essential city infrastructure was judged to outweigh returns to the city via sales and property tax revenues. But included also and key to the proposal were the South Cordova and Southwind-Windyke areas, both annexed by Memphis relatively recently, both sources of significant revenue for the city, and both hotbeds of de-annexation sentiment.

Some residents of both those areas, while pleased at being included in the “right-sizing” plan, professed themselves at subsequent public meetings to be dissatisfied by the plan’s proposed scheduling, which put off final implementation of their de-annexation until 2020 or 2021.

These residents’ restlessness has been increased further by the apparent disinclination of the Council for a definitive vote on the right-sizing plan before the legislature’s planned adjournment in April, and further yet by a growing consensus on the Council to arrange instead for referenda down the line in the affected city areas.

Hence the decision by the Roland group to exert direct pressure on the legislature to act on its own during the current session. “I’d be fine with having the Council act on it, but it doesn’t look like they’re going to,” declared the Millington Commissioner and declared candidate for County Mayor in 2018.

If the legislature should act on its own, it could well favor a reprise of the 2016 measure proposed by two Hamilton County suburbanites, state Rep. Mike Carter (R-Oooltewah) and state Senator Bo Watson (R-Hixson), whose original measure enabled easy referenda on de-annexation by any community annexed by a city since 1998.

The Carter-Watson measure, considered Draconian by Memphis and other affected cities, passed the House last year and was tabled in a Senate committee only by dint of monumental last-ditch exertions against it by officials of Memphis and other urban areas and by the Greater Memphis Area Chamber of Commerce.

One word of caution for the politically ambitious Roland from a Council source: “Curry Todd (R-Collierville) and [Steve] McManus (R-Cordova) got a message last year” — the idea being that former state Representatives Todd and McManus may have lost their reelection battles last year at least partly due to their zeal for the Carter-Watson bill and the resultant disaffection of influential donors in commercial and financial circles.

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Politics Politics Feature

Memphis Politics as Seen From Afar

SPA, Belgium — In the last four days, I have experienced: 1) Oktoberfest in Munich; 2) a half-day tour of the concentration camp at Dachau; 3) a lumberjack contest in Luxembourg; 4) a tour of the Battle of the Bulge sites, focused on the Belgian town of Bastogne; and 5) immersion in Fort La Ferté, a key component of the Maginot Line, the series of French fortifications which were meant to halt the German invasion of France in 1940, but failed to do so.

I have also, through the miracle of modern science, been able to kibitz via the internet Monday’s meeting of the Shelby County Commission, which, at 10:40 p.m., Spa time, had really just gotten started. 

As we speak, they are about to deal with zoning regulations applicable to private sex clubs. One of the clauses of a new ordinance being proposed by Josh Whitehead of the Office of Planning and Development will read, “A private sex club shall not be considered a place of worship.”

Commissioner David Reaves asks to be excused from voting. “I just can’t vote on something involving sex clubs,” he explains. The item, a compendium of several zoning matters, still passes with 12 votes.

Did I mention that I experienced Oktoberfest in Munich?

I’m on a bucket-list trip to Europe. Still to go, before I return for the final few days of the city election, are trips to Normandy, where the group I’m with will spend a couple of days looking at the D-Day landing areas, and then to Paris (briefly) before coming home. 

If the Normandy tour is anything like those we’ve been through so far, we’ll learn one hell of a lot that you can’t get from books. We’ll also work hard at it. At one point in going through the Maginot fortifications, where passages were sardine-can-size cramped, we had to troop up 167 steps of a winding stairway. Huff and puff doesn’t begin to describe it. The 140 or so defenders of Fort La Ferté died from smoke asphyxiation under bombardment in those claustrophobic confines.

Meanwhile, in Memphis, audience member Jane Pierotti is inveighing against a proposed commission rules change that would drop the number of votes required for a rules change from two-thirds of the membership to a simple majority. She quotes Lord Acton and notes that Darth Vader did not start out on “the dark side” but sure as heck ended up there.

This item passes with 12 votes as well.

I cannot pretend that I know everything that has transpired in the city election since I wrote last week’s cover-story roundup of the various races. The trend lines seem to be still in place, however, and, as far as I can see, will continue all the way through early voting and right up to the final October 8th election date.

The mayoral debate that WMC anchor Joe Birch and I co-moderated last Tuesday at the Rotary Club of Memphis was so even-keeled and impressive that almost everyone, including a key supporter of Mayor A C Wharton who normally spins with the best of them, concluded that all four participants — Wharton, Councilmen Jim Strickland and Harold Collins, and Memphis Police Association director Mike Williams — had demonstrated they were capable of running the city.

Part of that has to do with the fact that frequent interchanges with each other and with the public have made them all conversant with the issues of importance — a process that, as we noted editorially last week, just can’t, or shouldn’t, be skipped or foreshortened.

That all of them, after that dignified affair, went after each other, slugfest-style, at the University of Memphis the same night, doesn’t contradict that fact; it just indicates that they all are aware of the importance of the stakes.

Meanwhile, the commission is announcing plans to go into budget matters with an intensity and thoroughness that have not previously been the norm. “It may not be to the advantage of the administration,” opines new chairman Terry Roland, “but it will be to the advantage of the people.”

The commission, says Roland, will also look into EDGE, the joint city/county industrial development board, with the idea of making some serious changes.

Meanwhile, through the auspices of Education First, on an itinerary planned by former Shelby County Schools chairman David Pickler, I’m getting lessoned up on other, more historic battlefields.

Back at you next week before the final vote.

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Politics Politics Feature

Memorial Time

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The past week, properly enough, has been one of official memorials for the military veterans who have made the supreme sacrifice for their country, and — in this corner, anyhow — has also been a time to remember others who have left us or suffered significant harm on some other kind of firing line.

It was, for example, inspiring to see former journalist and current FedEx customer service specialist Oran Quintrell out and in public and appearing to be of good spirit at the annual Bratfest sponsored by various of his fellow Democratic activists in southeast Memphis on Memorial Day. It was the first outing for Quintrell, a victim of diabetes, since the amputation of his lower legs and his fitting for prosthetic substitutes.

It would be overdoing it to say that Quintrell was jaunty, but both he and his wife, Joyce, were satisfyingly whole and back to normal in any number of impressive ways, and gave every indication that they will be on hand to add their good cheer and stimulating company in all kinds of social situations to come.

Quintrell’s disease and rehab regimen have served as a “wake-up call,” observed his longtime friend Steve Steffens, a co-host for the Bratfest affair.

Diabetes has been much in the news of late. It was given as the proximate cause of death for the legendary B.B. King, who has been the subject of several memorials since his death last week in Las Vegas and was to be honored with yet another on Beale Street on Wednesday of this week.

And it was the focus of attention at the recent fund-raising banquet of the West Tennessee chapter of the Juvenile Diabetes Research Foundation (JDRF).

Held at the East Memphis Hilton on May 9th, the event was co-hosted by honorary Chairman David Pickler, the former longtime Shelby County Schools president, whose company, the Pickler Wealth Advisers, is an annual sponsor of the event and whose daughter, Katie Pickler, is chief development officer of the West Tennessee chapter. Emcee for the JDRF banquet was Darrell Greene, news anchor for WHBQ-TV, Fox 13.

Speaking of “satisfyingly whole” and “of good cheer,” it is hard to imagine anybody more suggestive of those phrases than Greene, a former star athlete during his student days in Arkansas and the very embodiment of public good health. Yet Darrell is one of the many victims of juvenile diabetes. After being diagnosed at the age of 24, he has had to submit to the same daily insulin regimen as other JD1 sufferers, a treatment routine that is necessary to sustain normal life, or, in some cases, life itself.

The JDRF banquet, which had a Roaring Twenties theme, attracted numerous luminaries, no few of them from the world of politics. The auction of items and services donated by various individuals and institutions raised more than $365,000 for research.

Juvenile diabetes (also known as Type 1) is so-called because it appears to be innate (i.e., likely present in some form from birth) and is not necessarily the result of specific life circumstances. Type 2, which accounts for most known cases, is more usually attributed to specific developmental circumstances, like obesity or overuse of sugar. Both kinds of diabetes involve impairment of the body’s metabolism and ability to process blood sugar and are threatening to life and limb.

• Last week also presented three occasions for friends to remember former state legislator and women’s rights activist Kathryn Bowers — memorial services at St. Paul Catholic Church on Friday (where video clips from her time in public life were shown), followed by a funeral mass there on Saturday and burial on Tuesday at Calvary Cemetery.

Bowers’ observances occurred on the same weekend as events in Memphis connected with the annual convention here of the Tennessee Federation of Democratic Women, an organization in which she had often figured large.

Bowers, a longtime member of the Democratic leadership in the House, was well-liked and respected across party lines despite the fact of her arrest in 2005 (almost 10 years ago, exactly), along with several other legislators, in the FBI’s Tennessee Waltz sting. Bowers’ arrest occurred only days after she was sworn in as a state senator after winning a special election to fill a vacancy.

After serving a brief prison term for bribery, Bowers devoted much of her time in recent years to charitable activity and to voter registration drives.

• As this is a column largely devoted to memory and memorials, I will take the opportunity to express some overdue condolences — to Adrienne Pakis-Gillon, a former candidate for the state Senate and a Democratic activist, for the death of her father, Jim Pakis, and to Susan and George Simmons, activists also, for the death of their son Forest, whose extraordinary good nature so clearly derived from that of his parents.

Even more overdue: condolences to the survivors of Shirley Boatright, a tireless campaign worker and strategist for all sorts of candidates and public figures, across all kinds of ideological lines, who died back in December 2013.

This list of overlooked remembrances is by no means complete and will be added to in the course of time.

• And, speaking of memorials, there was one clear message from the crowd of advocates and celebrants who showed up for an all-day “Roundhouse Revival” event on Saturday at the site of the long-dormant Mid-South Coliseum, now threatened with imminent extinction as a result of ongoing development plans.

And that message was: Rumors of the Coliseum’s uselessness have been greatly exaggerated. Discussed at the event, intermittently with music and even some ‘rassling featuring Jerry Lawler and Bill Dundee versus some certified bad guys, were a number of proposals, including one for a wrestling museum, which would allow the Coliseum to be rehabbed and retrofitted for new life.

Among the political figures observed there, either as spectators or as participants, were City Councilman (and mayoral candidate) Jim Strickland, City Council candidate Chooch Pickard, and County Commissioner Steve Basar. This, too, is an incomplete list.

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Letters To The Editor Opinion

Letters to the Editor

Schools Redux Redux

I laughed while reading David Pickler’s self-serving whine (Viewpoint, November 27th issue) about how Germantown deserves not to be “deprived” of its neighborhood schools. This sentence comes after he’s spent 500 words rewriting recent history to blame all the problems on the Memphis City Schools board, rather than copping to the fact that he started the ball rolling in the first place or, at the very least, accepting some portion of the blame for this mess. That would have been gracious (and true).

Plenty of evidence has come out that Germantown leaders originally were leery of committing to educating students not living in the Germantown city limits, so who can blame the new board for being skeptical of their plans for the future?

Payback is a bitch, David.

David Pickler

Nancy Reynolds

Memphis

My son will soon graduate from a Shelby County Schools (SCS) high school. He started his high school career at a Memphis City Schools (MCS) high school. But he didn’t transfer. He is still attending the same school where he started, with the same teachers, the same school colors, the same team nickname, the same problems, the same points of excellence.

We have spent three years, thousands of meeting hours, millions of dollars, miles of newsprint, and billions of wasted words on an issue that has split this community in half — to change one letter.

I can spell “stupid.” Too bad our “leaders” can’t.

C.L. Williams

Memphis

As a lifelong educator, I find it troubling to see what is happening in public education in regards to assessing students. I recently attended a public forum on this topic in Jackson, Tennessee. There, I found more evidence why we need to reevaluate what we are doing in Tennessee with regard to testing.

I listened while students and parents told of testing anxiety to the point that children were becoming physically ill from the pressure to do well on standardized tests. Teachers expressed concern about the amount of time being spent on preparing students for the tests. In many cases, as much as six weeks of instruction time is lost to preparing students for standardized tests. That doesn’t include the time required to administer the tests. If students were to go through K-12 in Tennessee with the current testing structure and take each class with an end-of-course exam, they would have to take 32 standardized tests by the end of their schooling.

Tennessee spent $40 million on testing in 2013. The new PARCC Assessment is being developed for the next school year and is currently funded by a $186 million Race to the Top grant. All of these tax dollars for testing are going to out-of-state vendors, rather than staying in our state to help children.

I serve as a county commissioner and sit on the budget committee. My county could use more help from the state in providing the basics that our students need — textbooks, technology, science labs, career technology programs, and buildings. I work at a school that has as many as 15 floating teachers in any given year, because there are not enough classrooms.

I am not opposed to assessments, but it has clearly gotten out of hand. Assessments shouldn’t be the sole indicator of success. Tennessee is now making student scores a major part of teacher evaluation, while approximately 60 percent of educators teach in untested areas. Additionally, the state board has tied teachers’ licensing to assessment scores. Many of Tennessee’s finest educators are either retiring or looking for other careers, because they are being set up for failure.

We are entering uncharted waters in Tennessee public education. Most of the school reform is being advocated by outside sources that will benefit financially. The quality and depth of learning is being sacrificed in Tennessee for an assessment score. Nothing will change until parents begin to say enough is enough. Please express your concerns to your governor, state legislators, state education commissioner, and Tennessee State Board of Education representative.

Jeff Lipford

President, McNairy County Education Association

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Opinion Viewpoint

All’s Well That Ends Well

Over the past 40 years, the Memphis and Shelby County community has been in an almost constant state of conflict — by race, by gender, by religious affiliation, and, most intriguing of all, by the accelerating divide between urban and suburban interests.  

David Pickler

It could be argued that despite 40 years of court-ordered actions to eliminate the vestiges of segregation, Memphis and Shelby County are more segregated today than at any time in history. While the prior focus of desegregation efforts focused on issues of race, today’s segregated Shelby seems to be principally a function of socioeconomic status.

The past few decades have witnessed an unprecedented level of population mobility, with large segments of the community choosing to vote with their feet. A significant result of this mobility has been the growth and development of Shelby’s six suburban communities. This outward expansion from the core city of Memphis has created substantial animosity from urban leaders, whether in municipal government or in education leadership.

It could be argued that a driving motivation behind the surrender of the charter of Memphis City Schools was an effort of urban Memphis leaders to effect a hostile takeover of the suburban school system. It is certainly unquestioned that the school merger issue was merely the latest chapter in a saga that has also included libraries, ambulances, police, and utility services.

As an aggressive and passionate advocate for Shelby County Schools, I was absolutely opposed to the ill-conceived Memphis City Schools charter surrender, and my public advocacy as a suburban leader made me a fairly easy target during the many months of urban-suburban battles at the ballot box and in the legislature. I was very proud to fight for the rights of suburban residents to the same educational autonomy that had been enjoyed by Memphis residents for many decades.

Upon the decision by federal Judge Hardy Mays that the merger would become the new reality, my fellow Shelby County Schools board members and I chose to fully engage in the work of the Transition Planning Commission and Transition School Board to attempt to navigate the uncharted waters of consolidation. We also watched with significant interest the diligent and passionate efforts of each of our six suburban communities to pursue their own educational independence.  

As the merger reached completion, the most significant issue remaining to be resolved was the decision about school buildings located within their municipal boundaries yet still owned by Shelby County Schools.

Despite much concern that the acrimony of the merger and creation of the new municipal districts would derail any meaningful attempts to negotiate a fair agreement for transfer of the buildings, an amazing degree of cooperation and compromise has emerged.

Agreements have been reached with five of the six municipal districts that would end the litigation battle between the Memphis City Council, Shelby County Commission, and suburban municipalities. These agreements provide a nominal series of payments to partially offset the remaining post-employment liabilities still retained by Shelby County Schools. The buildings would transfer without cost to the suburban taxpayers.

Still left to be resolved are negotiations with Germantown. These discussions have been tainted by unfortunate rhetoric on social media sites and in public emails and speeches. The recommendation by the superintendent and staff to retain three landmark Germantown schools has ignited a powder keg within the municipality.

Emotions have flared on both sides, as suburban advocates claim that Germantown is bearing the brunt of urban angst and anger in dismantling the newly merged district. A factor hindering Germantown’s position is a lack of consistency among city leaders and newly elected Germantown school board members as to their desired results.

Additionally, there is a significant lack of trust in Germantown’s long-term commitment to educating all the children currently being served in Germantown schools.

The public-education families living in Germantown should not be deprived of the same right to neighborhood schools that is being offered to every other family in all of Shelby County. I would hope that the spirit of cooperation evidenced in the negotiations with the five agreements already consummated would favor openness resulting in an appropriate agreement with Germantown. The time has come to heal and to focus on providing world-class educational opportunities to all children, urban or suburban. They are our future.

David Pickler is proprietor of Pickler Wealth Advisors and a member of the Shelby County Schools board.

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Politics Politics Feature

Germantown’s Trump Card?

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

On Wednesday of this week, representatives of the Germantown community were scheduled to make a presentation to the property disposition committee of the unified Shelby County Schools board.

Jackson Baker

David Pickler

Their presentation would attempt to resecure for the soon-to-be Germantown municipal school district the rights to three schools — Germantown High School, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown Elementary School — claimed for the unified district under the plan announced by Superintendent Dorsey Hopson and approved last week by the SCS board. Hopson and board attorney Valerie Speakman gave the thinnest possible license for negotiations on the point, so any major change on the point is unlikely.

But behind the scenes there is an effort brewing in Germantown to circumvent the Hopson plan, and, according to David Pickler, a Germantown member of the current SCS board, it would take the form of an application for charter-school status by the three affected schools — and perhaps by all eight public schools in Germantown, including the five left within the city’s municipal district by the Hopson plan.

Such an application might become the focal point of ongoing efforts in the Tennessee General Assembly to firm up state control of charter-school applications and the state’s authority to overrule decisions by local school boards on approving charter applications.

And, while, as Pickler concedes, the current SCS board’s ownership of public school buildings is “indisputable,” the conversion of Germantown schools into charter schools could, he believes, complicate the legal situation regarding control of the buildings.

Pickler acknowledged that the Hopson plan, which has met with the approval of several other incorporated suburbs, has tended to isolate Germantown from its sister suburbs, though he insisted that efforts to coordinate suburban school policy will go forward.

• Still to be determined is the effect of the incipient suburban schism on plans for a consortium of municipal school districts at some not-too-distant date. Plans for such a reassembling of the old suburban-only Shelby County Schools system have been in the works for some time, though getting all six of the soon-to-be suburban districts on board has so far been an elusive goal.

The Hopson plan may complicate things further, depending on what happens with regard to the policy wedge which the plan has temporarily created between Germantown and several of its neighbors.

One of the most rapt attendees at last week’s meeting of the Unified School Board was John Aitken, former superintendent of the former version of SCS, consisting of the six incorporated areas plus the unincorporated areas of Shelby County. It was no secret that Aitken had wanted the superintendency of the unified system, the position now held by Hopson, and had won the de facto endorsement of the Transition Planning Commission, the blue-ribbon group, created by the Norris-Todd Act of 2011, which labored throughout 2011 and into 2012 to prepare a comprehensive plan for city-county educational unity.

Aitken’s hopes were eventually doomed by resistance from the residual Memphis City Schools board core on the provisional 23-member board that bridged the city and county systems up until July. So, like former MCS superintendent Kriner Cash before him, Aitken took retirement, announcing it at an emotionally fraught meeting of the provisional board in March.

But Aitken was subsequently engaged by the municipalities of Germantown, Collierville, Arlington, and Lakeland as a “consultant” on the establishment of their school systems, and, as Pickler made clear in an interview with the Flyer some months ago, it was contemplated that Aitken become the acting head of the prospective suburban school consortium.

The fate of that consortium — which Bartlett and Millington had not yet bought into — is now further clouded by fallout from the Hopson plan and will doubtless at some point figure on the agendas of the suburban school boards elected this week by the six municipalities.

• Various sources are now floating the idea that the official name of Germantown High School is actually Mabel C. Williams High School — a fact that could have at least symbolic consequences on the disposition of the high school and its two on-site sibling institutions going forward. Asked about the issue, Pickler said there was evidence that the actual nomenclature for GHS might indeed be Mabel C. Williams and that the actual name of Bartlett High School could be Nicholas Blackwell High School. He noted that when ex post facto honorary diplomas were issued to military veterans who attended both schools, they bore those vintage names.

• As first noted on the Flyer‘s website last week, federal judge William J. Haynes Jr., chief judge of the Middle Tennessee district, ruled last Thursday that the Shelby County Election Commission must list Jim Tomasik as a Libertarian Party candidate on the special election ballots for state House District 91 — not, as had previously been the case in preliminary listings, as an independent.

The special election, scheduled for November 21st, with early voting in effect from November 1st through November 16th, will pit Tomasik against Ramesh Akbari, who won the Democratic nomination for the seat in a special primary election on October 8th. The election is to determine a successor to the late Lois DeBerry.

In view of the closeness of the general election date, lawyers for Tomasik had sought an emergency injunction from Haynes, who, after hearing arguments Thursday, issued it from the bench.

In making his ruling, Haynes noted that in February 2012 he had already ruled unconstitutional provisions of Tennessee’s preexisting ballot access law, which had allowed automatic ballot access only for Democratic and Republican candidates, requiring “minor” parties to meet standards for ballot access which he considered prohibitively difficult.

That ruling was in response to a joint suit by the Green Party and Constitutional Party, who were faced with a requirement to present roughly 40,000 signatures on petitions to gain state ballot access. That figure, representing 2.5 percent of the votes cast in the previous gubernatorial election, was coupled with early deadlines and with requirements that petitioners be members of the affected parties.

The office’s state election coordinator Mark Goins and Secretary of State Tre Hargett were the defendants in 2012 and in Libertarian Tomasik’s case as well. The state has appealed Haynes’ 2012 ruling.

Meanwhile, efforts have been under way in the General Assembly to reform the state’s ballot access law. State senator Jim Kyle (D-Memphis) filed SB 1091 in the 2013 legislative session, which would require milder requirements for minor parties to gain ballot access — 250 petitioners in the case of state Senate or state House elections.

The bill was bottled up in the state and local committees of both legislative chambers, but a nine-member study commission on ballot access was created, with Kyle the sole Democrat among six legislative members. One member each from the Green, Libertarian, and Constitutional parties filled out the commission’s membership.

Kyle said that Ken Yager (R-Harriman), chairman of the House state and local committee and ad hoc chair of the commission, had canceled a meeting of the commission scheduled for mid-October. That was about the time that Tomasik filed his suit.

Prior to Thursday’s hearing and Haynes’ ruling, Kyle had welcomed the hearing as a test case for ballot access reform. The Memphis Democrat, chairman of the Senate Democratic caucus, said Jason Huff of his staff had done a study indicating that both the state and the nation were subject to cycles of party realignment which recurred roughly every 70 years and that the political ferment for such a moment was at hand.

Kyle also suggested that states with elected secretaries of state had proved most amenable to ballot access reform and that perhaps Tennessee should transition to a method of popular election for its secretary of state.

While Democrats statewide might, like Kyle, take solace from Judge Haynes’ ruling, the immediate impact of it among Democratic activists in Shelby County was to generate a minor alarm as to its effect on the forthcoming special general election for the state House District 91 seat.

Gale Jones Carson of Memphis, secretary of the state Democratic Party and a member of the Democratic National Committee, sent out an email to party members this week stating that the ruling could spur a turnout on behalf of the Libertarian candidate. “Tomasik’s candidacy should not be taken for granted, particularly during this expected low voter turnout special election,” Carson warned.

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Opinion

Hopson and Pickler on New Board and Superintendent

Dorsey Hopson

  • Dorsey Hopson

If he has any qualms about being chosen as “permanent” Shelby County Schools superintendent by just 6 of the 23 board members he worked with for the last two years, Dorsey Hopson wasn’t talking about them Wednesday.

Asked if he could do a brief telephone interview, Hopson replied by email:

“I am deeply honored and humbled by the confidence that the board has shown in my leadership. We have so much work to do and I am excited about this once in a lifetime opportunity to lead and serve our community. We will have many challenges ahead but we will face them in a transparent and responsible way. I look forward to working with our board and the entire community.”

Hopson was legal counsel to Memphis City Schools under Dr. Kriner Cash and interim superintendent for a year. His contract details have yet to be worked out.

In its first meeting, the new “seven-member board” that is actually only six members until the seventh slot is filled, unanimously chose Hopson and told the superintendent search firm — which concluded after two months that a viable candidate could not be found given the uncertainty — the deal was done. One week ago the board had 23 members, and within a year it could have 13 members.

The ratio of students to board members in the county system is roughly 24,000-1.

David Pickler

  • David Pickler

The day after the superintendent selection, board member David Pickler was at a meeting of the National School Boards Association to discuss, among other things in the media announcement, “the lack of flexibility local public schools currently face.” He is president of the association.

Pickler said school boards in the association range in size from 3 to 23 members. He said the “ideal” size would be 5 to 9 members.

He said Hopson should have “at least a two-year contract and preferably three or four years.”

He said that if the suburbs leave the county system his district should still have representation on the county board because it includes parts of Cordova and the Southwind area that are not in Germantown. Pickler’s term ends September 1, 2014.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Roads Not Taken

In the same way that, proverbially, all roads once ran to Rome, all breaking-news issues seem these days to run to the intractably divisive matter of school consolidation.

Projected budget shortfalls for the forthcoming Unified School District have dominated recent headlines in their own right. They also link to all the lingering discontent of the suburbs regarding the matter — both locally and in Nashville, where suburbanites and their legislative allies are expected to make another run at bills enabling municipal school districts.

The shortfalls, estimates of which now range from $80 million to upwards of $150 million, were the occasion for a press conference Monday in the lobby of the Vasco Smith county building, at which spokespersons for the independence movement urged an end to the Shelby County Commission’s ongoing lawsuit against potential MSDs.

Pinning their case on the expected shortfall, they suggested that cuts in school personnel and programs could be avoided by aborting the forthcoming city/county school merger.

In a ruling last year, U.S. district judge Hardy Mays declared unconstitutional 2012 legislation in the General Assembly that would have enabled the fast-track establishment of separate suburban school districts. Still to be adjudicated is the final clause of the 2011 Norris-Todd Act, which would permit efforts to create such districts after August of this year.

As principal spokesman Ken Hoover argued it at the press conference, the proposed MSDs would be financed by taxes already voted by residents of the suburbs, whereas the soon-to-be Unified District faces insuperable obstacles in paying for its services, thereby shortchanging parents in the suburbs as well as those in the former Memphis City Schools.

Later, at the end of the county commission’s regular meeting and after a suburban resident or two had addressed the county legislative body on the subject, Hoover came to the dock and presented a distilled version of what he had already spoken to at the press conference.

Not without a full dose of “I-told-you-so” and a taste or two of irony, he focused on the loss, implicit in the proposed Unified School District budget, of 443 positions to the suburban schools — and, even as amended in a revised budget due Tuesday, of no less than 377.

His remarks to the commission were followed by a mini-philippic from Commissioner Terry Roland, who placed the blame for the ongoing litigation — and, by implication, for the seemingly insoluble budget crunch of the Unified System — on the county commission itself, for presuming to take charge of the merger process and establish a structure for it.

Commissioner Wyatt Bunker, a onetime member of the old Shelby County Schools board, continued along lines set by his two predecessors, but he concluded with his announcement of “a resolution directing … our attorney, Leo Bearman, to take all measures necessary to withdraw the county commission’s lawsuit opposing the creation of municipal schools.”

To be voted on at Monday’s meeting required a suspension of the rules, which predictably failed, given the commission’s 8-5 balance of power favoring merger proponents. But Bunker will have a chance to add his resolution to the next commission agenda, two weeks hence. And it will no doubt be debated in committee on Wednesday, February 20th.

Meanwhile, Roland, who apparently made a pilgrimage to Nashville last week, and other suburban advocates insist that, despite the reluctance of last year’s General Assembly to pass legislation allowing new municipal school districts statewide, this year’s legislature will be a different story.

All that is certain is that there will be a Unified School District in 2013-14 that includes the whole of Shelby County. How it gets paid for and what comes after that are questions not yet answered.

• Earlier at the commission meeting, there had been a wrangle over a proposed five-year moratorium on county residence requirements for former Memphis City Schools personnel coming into the county’s jurisdiction in the Unified District.

An amendment by Chairman Mike Ritz exempting (or “grandfathering in”) employees of MCS who started in 1986 or before was proposed and passed, but no general exemption was enacted despite vigorous arguments by commissioners James Harvey, Steve Mulroy, and others.

The case for a general exemption was countered by several commissioners, notably Heidi Shafer and Walter Bailey, who argued that public employment within Shelby County imposed civic obligations that included taxpaying residence.  

That argument seemed to carry the day. The umbrella exemption failed 6-6.

Categories
Opinion

School Board Members Jones and Pickler Trade Accusations

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Martavius Jones and David Pickler have been school board adversaries since the start of the debate over a unified school system, but now the disagreement is personal.

Both men are financial advisers. In December, Jones surprised members of the Unified School Board with a formal resolution (nine “whereas” paragraphs plus one “therefore be it resolved”) requesting Pickler’s immediate resignation “for failure to publicly disclose the apparent conflict of interest and direct or indirect benefit and/or personal gain” from his public office.

This week Pickler formally replied with a point-by-point rebuttal from an attorney he hired, Stephen Shields, plus a personal letter and a warning that “I am reserving all legal options to remedy the harm” to his reputation. The letter from Shields says “causes of action such as false light and defamation do exist, of course, but an assessment of the viability of such causes is beyond the scope of this analysis.”

Pickler and Jones are holdovers from the old county and city school boards, and often appear in media stories and public forums. The charge and counter-charge have landed in the lap of the unified board’s three-member Ethics Committee which, like all things board related, is newly created and finding its bearings. The upshot: one more thing to divide and distract the board as it tries to create a unified school system by August.

The crux of the complicated complaint is that Pickler and/or his firm, Pickler Wealth Advisers, benefited from commissions for a $12 million school board investment in the Tennessee School Board Association Trust at American Funds, a mutual fund company. Pickler is former secretary/treasurer of the TSBA board of directors and an investment advisor to the trust since 2009.

“It is the opinion of legal counsel that allegations made by Mr. Jones are simply inaccurate,” Pickler says in a letter to board member and committee chair Teresa Jones. “If I had any conflict of interest at all, it was at best indirect in nature and that in any event my outside interests were the subject of disclosures that fully met the requirements of state law and board policy.”

He asks the board to request that Jones withdraw his “ill-conceived” resolution and apologize for the distractions and discomfort to Pickler and his business partner.

Jones zeroed in on a June 26, 2012 vote of the school board on the general fund budget for Memphis City Schools. In his self-described “independent legal analysis,” Shields says the contribution to the trust fund was from the 2011-2012 budget, not the budget that was voted on in June, and therefore Pickler did not vote on it and no disclosure was required.

Pickler made disclosures to the Shelby County Board in 2009 when there was a trust item on the agenda. And he disclosed his role as a broker during a unified board committee meeting in November, 2012 and again as part of a board audit in September.

Jones said he would not have learned of the alleged disclosure problem but for a letter from the TSBA finance director in July on which he was mistakenly copied.

The only certain outcome of this is an end to the veneer of collegiality and mutual respect that marked the first two years of the Pickler-Jones relationship. The charge is a serious one, and the gloves are off now.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

On Second Thought …

CREDIT: Danziger

It seems like forever, but really it’s only been slightly more than two years since the clouds first gathered over public education in Memphis and Shelby County, and the storms they presaged have not yet abated. Among our hopes for the coming year, one of the foremost is that the chaos that has rained down upon us since the beginnings of the school-merger crisis will be resolved — judicially, legislatively, howsoever.

To recap just how we got here from there: The elections of 2010 proved disruptive in more than one way. First, the August countywide voting of that year produced an unexpected blanket win for a Republican slate of candidates in the face of a demographic base that seemed ready-made for Democrats. That circumstance encouraged suspicions of electoral hanky-panky among Democratic-leaning voters in general and the African Americans who now constituted a majority in Shelby County in particular. And, though no credible evidence has emerged to demonstrate that anything untoward had occurred, misgivings (as well as legal challenges to the outcome) have not yet been stilled. If anything, a nonstop series of glitches that marred the election process, not only in 2010 but even more glaringly in 2012, have magnified a discord which existed at all levels — political, social, racial, and economic.

The election results of November 2010 fostered further division. A referendum on political consolidation of Memphis and Shelby County was on the ballot to rekindle passions and animosities, and it went down in flames in outer Shelby County while eking out a bare majority within the city limits of Memphis. Bad omen. And, fueled by Tea Party resentments, the Republican sweep of legislative races statewide in that election was the proximate cause of the school crisis.

Popular legend has it that David Pickler, then the long-standing president of the Shelby County Schools board, was first mover when he opined out loud that the General Assembly would now be likely to approve special-school-district status for SCS. Pickler himself notes that Martavius Jones, his opposite number on the Memphis City Schools board, had already vented the idea of surrendering the MCS charter to force city/county school merger. The chicken-egg question hardly matters: The charter surrender occurred, and the merger process got under way, as did legislative efforts to abort it or deflect it on behalf of the Shelby County suburbs.

Although Judge Hardy Mays has not ruled on all aspects of the ensuing litigation — specifically, on whether the Norris-Todd Act of 2011 allows suburban municipal school districts to begin forming after August 2013 in Shelby County — he has already found unconstitutional a bill by state senator Mark Norris that would have made for an early kick-start of such Shelby-only schools.      

The result is that there will apparently be, in both name and in fact, a Unified School District for at least the 2013-14 academic year. Our hope is that residents of the suburbs will give the new system a chance to work in what amounts to a court-ordained laboratory period. This is one of those times when a little constructive second-guessing would seem to be in order.