Tag: Dorsey Hopson

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News News Blog

Two Shelby County Schools Have Worked Their Way Off the Priority List

Springdale Elementary

City University Boys Preparatory and Springdale Elementary School, both in the Shelby County Schools (SCS) system, have worked their way off the “Priority list” of schools with scores in the bottom five percent.

Tennessee releases new Priority lists every three years, and though 2015 is an off-year, the Tennessee Department of Education shared information with SCS to let them know the two schools had already earned their way off the list. Removal from the list depends on a school’s one-year success rate exceeding the 15th percentile when ranked against other schools in the state.

Additionally, 35 SCS schools have earned their way onto the state’s 2015 Rewards Schools list, which lists the top five percent of schools in the state. Middle College High remains on the list for both performance and growth, the only school in SCS to do so and for two years in a row.

“We’re always excited to see our schools make progress, especially those named Reward schools for exemplary results in the 2014-15 school year,” said SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson. “We recognize that more work is necessary to ensure across-the-board gains in performance and progress, but this is proof that in many cases, we’re trending in the right direction.”

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Editorial Opinion

OPED Issues at Shelby County Schools

CREDIT: Danziger

Like probably every other publication in town, as well as any other Memphians and Shelby Countians who have some degree of involvement with or interest in public affairs, we are on retired citizen Joe Saino’s mailing list. Saino, whom we made the subject of a Flyer profile some years ago, keeps a close eye on how taxpayer money gets spent, and he is generous about sharing his research, which almost always runs to the ways that we (and that “we” is our governments) are spending — or have committed to spend — too much, without taking the necessary steps to properly fund our liabilities.

Saino is much like Tennessee’s junior U.S. senator, Bob Corker, in that he not only frets about public spending, he itemizes his anxieties and, as often as not, proposes solutions that are equally itemized. And, further like the senator, who most recently vented his concerns about overspending at the national level at a Chamber of Commerce luncheon in Memphis two weekends ago, Saino sees himself as a voice in the wilderness, a prophet of sorts who isn’t being sufficiently listened to.

The initials OPEB (“other post-employment benefits”) are a familiar element of the public dialogue these days, and Saino, as much as anybody, is responsible for raising public awareness about them. In essence, OPEBs — which include such benefits to retirees as life insurance, health care, and disability payments — were at the root of some painful budget decisions made in city government over the past couple of years (and will figure significantly in this year’s city elections). And they have now come front and center in discussions concerning the budget of Shelby County government for the fiscal year 2015-16.

County government bears the brunt of expenditures for local public education, and Shelby County Schools (SCS) has just presented the county a bill for a $14.9 million budget increase that has to do — largely or at least significantly — with the OPEB matter. At least, that’s the opinion of Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell, who saw fit to scold the SCS administration for ignoring the need to limit OPEB expenses while county government, voluntarily, and Memphis city government, more or less involuntarily but realistically, had been dealing with the issue in recent years. Luttrell went so far as to advise SCS, “Maybe you need to look at layoffs.”

In budget committee meetings last week, the Shelby County Commission provisionally agreed to adopt an administration plan that cut the SCS request in half, but that won’t be set in stone until the next public commission meeting of June 1st, if at all. And if it does get final commission approval, the SCS board and administration will have little choice but to make some difficult decisions of their own. A day after the commission reached its preliminary conclusions, an SCS board meeting on Thursday took up the OPEB matter but reached no firm conclusions about what to do.

Should SCS join an ongoing suit by the Chattanooga school system against state underfunding to localities of BEP (Basic Education Program) funds? Of course, it should. But that’s long-term. Hopefully, school officials can reach a Solomonic decision on OPEB cuts by themselves — before June 1st, if possible; before July 1st, by necessity.

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Politics Politics Feature

Short-changing the Schools

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At one point in the Shelby County Commission’s crash session on aspects of school financing on Monday, the subject of charter schools came up amid a discussion of whether closing schools actually saved taxpayer money. 

Shelby County Schools (SCS) Chair Teresa Jones noted wanly that, while her board can decide on school closures for financial reasons — and has done so frequently — it has no such authority over charter schools, regarding which the Tennessee Board of Education is now the principal overseer, thanks to actions of the Tennessee General Assembly.

That part of the conversation was a reminder of the degree to which local control of public school education has succumbed to the dictates of state government, like so much else that used to be the prerogative of local jurisdictions — control of firearms in municipal parks, for example, or the right to impose wage and anti-discrimination standards in the public sphere.

But nowhere has what many see as the quashing of local choices been more pronounced than in the administration of public education. One of the premises of SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson‘s recent request of the county commission for an additional $14.9 million funding had to do with the interruptions and diversions in state outlays caused by the hodge-podge of overlapping of school types and districts that — for better or for worse — have transformed the landscape of local education. 

It may sound progressive and civic-minded when one state school official, such as Candice McQueen, the recently named Tennessee Commissioner of Education, speaks in Memphis on Monday about a new abundance of “choices,” and it may sound decisive when another, Chris Barbic, head of the state’s Achievement School District, boasts that his efforts to revamp student results in the “failing” schools he administers (a majority of which are in Memphis) are not  answerable to any potentially troublesome school board. But the reality in both cases is that local control of education, once a given, has been pre-empted.

The aforementioned session held on Monday by the county commission, in tandem with SCS officials, was largely about the dislocations caused by this shift in responsibility, and a key component of that discussion was the allegation that Nashville has been consistently short-changing the several school districts of Shelby County of the funding levels required by the state’s own Basic Education Program (BEP).

The problem is not Shelby County’s alone. Back in March, the Hamilton County (Chattanooga) Board of Education, after meeting in the state capital with representatives of Tennessee’s other major urban school districts, including SCS, filed suit against the state in Nashville Chancery Court, contending that the state’s underfunding of BEP-ordained levels amounts to the better part of a billion dollars and “shifts the cost of education to local boards of education, schools, teachers, and students, resulting in substantially unequal educational opportunities across the state.”

That, in a nutshell, is the issue that confronts SCS and the county’s six municipal school districts, as well as Shelby County government, which has responsibility for making up the deficits in school funding.

Whatever the result of this legal action, the ever-aggrandizing state educational apparatus, the governor’s office, and the General Assembly have been put on notice.

 

· More from that crash session on Monday: Public school education in Shelby County may never again become the political football it was during the years of merger/de-merger controversy, but it’s begun to move in that direction again, for purely budgetary reasons.

Not quite two weeks after a request for additional funding by SCS Chief Hopson that occasioned a reaction from Shelby County Commission members that several observers described as a “love-fest,” the thrill is definitely gone, and the $14.9 million add-on money sought by Hopson now looks like so much pie in the sky — in a very overcast sky, at that.

The meeting was called by commission budget Chair Heidi Shafer to re-examine the issue of school funding in general (and funding in relation to three initialized considerations — BEP, OPEBs, and MOE — in particular). Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell — who attended the meeting and, along with his CAO, Harvey Kennedy, and CFO, Mike Swift, intervened at key moments — laid it on the line, bluntly: “We cannot afford $18 million [the amount of Hopson’s request, plus an additional amount that would be routed by average-daily-attendance (ADA) formula to the county’s municipal schools].”

Luttrell topped that by adding, as an aside to SCS representatives on hand, “You might try looking at lay-offs.”

One of the issues, clearly, is the mayor’s concern that his proposed 2015-2016 budget of $1.18 billion, which must be acted on by the commission before the fiscal-year deadline of July 1st has been squeezed down to a level that avoids the need for a tax increase this year — although subsequent teasing by various county hands has revealed a de facto surplus of $6 million that is theoretically available for ad hoc needs.

That yields another issue, one alluded to even at the aforementioned love-fest of May 6th — the fact that SCS officials have chosen not to tap that $178 million fund balance of theirs to cover the projects they want paid for. 

School officials have accounted for this reluctance in various ways — some roundabout, some not, some (in defense of maintaining a healthy reserve) even common-sensical — but commission members seem much less inclined to indulge SCS on the point than they were two weeks ago.

Commissioner David Reaves, a former SCS board member himself, put it straightforwardly to the various representatives of SCS — CFO Alicia Lindsey and members Teresa Jones (chair), Kevin Woods (vice chair), and Chris Caldwell (SCS budget chair) — who spent the better part of three hours fielding inquiries from the commission.

Said Reaves: “The reality is, how do you justify having that much money in a savings acccount and asking for $18 million? It’s tough to justify.”

Commissioner Walter Bailey, arguably the most lenient commission member on budgeting for schools, asked the SCS reps a series of questions designed to establish the point that they had already cut their ambitions for next year’s budget to the bone. But he got very little backup from other commission members, even the most SCS-friendly among them.

Clearly, the likelihood is that SCS will be forced to scale back its monetary request — much of which is being sought to keep up funding for various educational strategies that were formerly taken care of by expired or expiring grants from the Gates Foundation and the Race to the Top federal competition won by Tennessee.

The fate of SCS’ fund request was really just a sideshow to the meeting’s main purpose — which was to look critically at the county’s school-funding predicament vis-à-vis the aforementioned alphabetized issues: the BEP; OPEBs (Other Post-Employment Benefits), meaning the benefits contractually owed to retirees in addition to pensions; and MOE (maintenance-of-effort funding), the educational-spending minimums prohibited by the state from being reduced for any reason other than drops in student numbers.

It was on the matter of OPEBs that Luttrell had become most didactic, pointing out that, while county government had seen the writing on the wall regarding the escalating unaffordability of such costs, “others had not,” and he specified SCS as a major procrastinator. Memphis, too, had belatedly begun to reduce OPEB costs, almost to the vanishing point, and he suggested SCS did the same.

County Financial Officer Swift turned the screw a little tighter, noting that at current levels of obligation, OPEB expenses would be costing SCS something like $94 million annually — a sum which, he said with classic understatement, did not seem “feasible.”

The status of MOE obligations on Shelby County government at large was treated as a related phenomenon, but any hopes of getting to the bottom of it were fairly well scotched by a consensus view of the administration and county attorneys that MOE amount for a given jurisdiction were predicated on the third year of a scheduled spending cycle — the latest of these beginning with the de-merger brought about by the creation of six suburban school districts.  

The commission will give all these matters another go-round on Wednesday, its regular committee day.

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News The Fly-By

Shelby County Schools Plan Will Prepare More Students For College

Eighty percent of this year’s second-graders will walk across the stage at their high school graduations in 2025 prepared to pursue higher education or a meaningful career if a new Shelby County Schools (SCS) strategic plan is effective.

“Destination 2025” seeks to ensure 80 percent of graduating seniors will be college- or career-ready; 90 percent of students will graduate on time; and 100 percent of college- or career-ready graduates will enroll in a post-secondary education.

“The current state of the school system is solid but needs lots of sustained improvement,” said SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson. “If we’re able to reach the goals we set forth, it’ll change not only schools in the district but the economic outlook for Memphis and Shelby County. We did an analysis: If we have 90 percent of students graduate and going to post-secondary opportunities, it’ll generate about $5 billion in the next 10 years.”

Hopson revealed the five key priorities that will be implemented to help achieve Destination 2025’s goals during a kickoff event at Cummings School last week.

Those include strengthening early literacy; improving post-secondary readiness; developing teachers, leaders, and central office support to drive student success; expanding high-quality school options; and mobilizing family and community partners.

The dozens of elementary students who sat in pews in the Cummings School auditorium erupted in cheers after hearing the rewards that would be provided to the schools that boasted the highest increase in literacy rates.

Each student in both the elementary and middle school that has the greatest growth in literacy performance on this year’s TCAP compared to last year will win a pair of tickets to a Grizzlies game next season.

The high school with the greatest improvement in literacy performance on its End-of-Course assessment compared to last year will receive a school-wide celebration hosted by K-97 FM, along with a yet-unnamed “A-list recording artist.”

Presently, only about a third of SCS students read at grade level by the time they finish the third grade. SCS is implementing a new comprehensive literacy plan, improving pre-K classes, and seeking out more teachers who specialize in early education literacy.

“If you don’t know how to read, you’re going to be significantly hampered in life,” Hopson said. “No matter what you want to be, you have to know how to read.”

The Destination 2025 plan will provide students with more access to rigorous courses and expand the career pathways of youths who don’t attend college.

The plan also seeks to strengthen SCS’s development of teachers, principals, and central office supporters.

“The most important thing is not [a student’s] socio-economic background or their race, but the person who stands at the front of the class, so we want to make sure that we have great teachers throughout the district,” Hopson said. “We [also] want to make sure that we have great school leaders. There’s no such thing as a great school without a great leader.”

Destination 2025 will also target and improve identified “struggle schools” as well as provide continued expansion to the ones that presently boast higher scores.

During the celebration last week, the SCS elementary students, who sported red shirts emblazoned with the words “Destination 2025,” marveled at performances from the Overton High School show choir and Whitehaven High School marching band, along with Grizz, the Memphis Grizzlies mascot. 

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News News Blog

Teachers Express Anger Over Compensation Plan

So many teachers showed up to the Shelby County Schools (SCS) board meeting Tuesday night to protest a proposed performance-based compensation plan that attendees were being asked to watch the meeting on TVs in a separate area of the administration building.

During a nearly hour-long public comment period in a standing-only room, teacher after teacher expressed outrage at the new plan, which provides for annual raises based on performance. The issue for many teachers is that performance is determined by their Teacher Effectiveness Measure (TEM) score, which ranks from level one (lowest) to level five (highest). Those with level one and two scores will not receive raises, but teachers with level three scores will get an $800 raise. Teachers with level four will receive $1,000, and level five teachers will get $1,200.

teacher_pay.jpg

The TEM scores are partially determined by student surveys and a school’s overall standing, and some teachers don’t think those factors should judge their individual performances.

“I’ve had no cost of living adjustment in four years, and my health insurance has quadrupled in 10 years,” said Ethan Randall, a teacher a Kingsbury High School. “And the current TEM process is entirely subjective.”

As teachers took turns at the podium, opponents of the compensation plan held up signs and cheered. But when a handful of teachers expressed support for the new plan, the opposing teachers in the crowd booed, leading SCS Board Chair Teresa Jones to chide them. She asked security to remove anyone who interrupted the speakers “by any means necessary.”

One of those supporters was Becky Taylor, a teacher at Idlewild. She called the compensation plan equitable and cited the fact that Memphis teachers make higher salaries than teachers in Nashville.

“In most professions, performance-based pay seems rational,” Taylor said.

After the public comment period, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson defended the compensation plan, and he claimed that many of the plan’s opponents were spreading misinformation.

“When we look at overall performance of this district, we have got to do something different,” Hopson said. “We have got to drastically improve achievement.”

Hopson said he’d heard some teachers complain that SCS could only afford to fund the new plan if the number of level five teachers was lowered. But he said that wasn’t true. He said 80 percent of SCS’ teachers were currently at levels four and five, and the new system was based on those numbers.

“It is also absolutely false that there’s a plan to rate teachers low,” Hopson said. “We want teachers to be evaluated fairly.”

Board member Kevin Woods told the teachers in the room that the board is listening to their concerns with the new plan, and he said he’d like to see the board develop a more comprehensive approach to evaluating teacher performance. But he agreed with Hopson that something has to be done to improve overall achievement.

“I heard one teacher say that Memphis was the highest paid district in the state, but we also need to be the highest performing district,” Woods said.

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Opinion Viewpoint

Memphis’ Truancy “Crisis”

Call me skeptical, but I think it’s really time for Memphis to move on from the Ebola “crisis” to issues that are more based in reality. We are very unlikely to be hit by an epidemic of what is no doubt a dreadful disease if you’re living in or have visited three countries in West Africa recently.

But the one lone Ebola-related story I’ve covered did open my eyes to the precautions the Shelby County Health Department and the Office of Preparedness have been taking to assure the safety of our citizens. Since the 9-11 attacks, local government agencies have worked diligently to organize a program of preparedness to deal with catastrophic natural disasters and health epidemics — from swine flu to SARS to the one-in-a-million possibility of an Ebola outbreak in the Bluff City. Such advance planning should be commended.

But it’s time to bring the same level of attention to a more relevant crisis — student truancy — and the direct connection it has to our problems with youth violence.

As Shelby County Schools Superintendent Dorsey Hopson asserted two weeks ago in an interview with Fox 13, he stands prepared to tackle the truancy issue by withholding financial benefits from parents who have consistently failed to meet their responsibilities in getting their children to school. He admitted punitive action is not a road he wants to go down, but he’s also realistic enough to know he’s got to have the legal backing and the political will of those in government to take a proactive stance.

Within the past two weeks, SCS has finally begun getting a numerical grasp on the atrocious situation of children not showing up in the classroom this year. They estimated the number, peaking at the start of the school year in August, to be around 9,000 students. By late September, nearly 4,000 students had met or exceeded the five-day threshold of unexcused absences. If reported to the district attorney’s office, parents of these children could presumably face fines and possible jail time. So far, only one person has been prosecuted under that standard, but it’s not like student truancy is a new problem.

Just two years ago, the legacy Memphis City Schools system was lauded for creating truancy assessment centers where truants were picked up by police and, together with their parents, made to work with school officials to find ways of getting them back to school. Because of budget cuts, that program no longer exists. Perhaps, if the city of Memphis, as cash-strapped as it may be, could start paying on the $57 million that two court rulings have explicitly made clear is owed to SCS, there would be enough money to restart and expand that now-defunct program.

Here’s where we get back to that idea of “preparedness.” We have for a decade and beyond known this city and county have a propensity for failing to meet the minimal educational needs of all its students. We have never had the foresight to devise a comprehensive plan that puts more money into all aspects of education than we consistently put into the penal system or into security measures aimed at dealing with possible health epidemics and natural catastrophes. Yet, there seems to be no concerted effort to address and follow through on tough choices that could bring real results in saving generations of children who continue to fall through the cracks in our educational system.

It may well be time to get behind Hopson’s idea of making parents financially accountable for not meeting their responsibilities, time to stand behind the line he wants to draw in the sand. Instead of pitying those parents for their negligence, because they’re not informed about the avenues of help available to them, we should insist and demand they take the time to find out for themselves. We should insist they show up at a parent/teacher conference, a PTA meeting, or even a school board meeting. They owe it to the future of their own families to do so, just like every other forward-thinking person in this country. I’ll predict right now nobody in Memphis is going to die from Ebola. But, there’s a good chance we’ll perish from the disease of neglecting the education of our children.

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News News Blog

Dorsey Hopson on the SCS Budget, School Closures, and Re-zoning

Dorsey Hopson

  • Dorsey Hopson

Shelby County Schools (SCS) Superintendent Dorsey Hopson, SCS Chief of Staff Reginald Porter, and SCS Board Chair Kevin Woods addressed the media today on several key issues affecting the school system.

On the budget:
* Hopson said SCS has $227 million less in this year’s budget than in last year’s budget. Budget hearings will begin on Friday and last for 4 to 6 weeks.
* Some SCS central office positions may be cut, but Hopson said “the goal is to keep cuts as far away from the classroom as possible.”

On re-zoning:
* SCS board members will be tasked soon with voting on more than two dozen student attendance zoning changes. Re-zoning adjustments are needed because of the separate municipal school districts that are opening in the new school year. Several public re-zoning hearings that were scheduled for this week have been rescheduled because of the weather.

* Hopson said his proposals would “keep zoning as close to [students’] houses as possible.” Porter vowed that “student interest is first and foremost when we make the decisions.”

On school closures:
* Although Westhaven Elementary students will be moving to Fairley Elementary next school year because Westhaven’s building is in poor condition and must be demolished, the board plans to ask the Shelby County Commission for $11 million to build a new school that will be occupied by Westhaven and Fairley students. Hopson said Fairley would eventually be torn down as well, if the commission grants the funds to build a new school. Woods said he believes the Shelby County Commission would support this plan, and he feels confident they’ll vote to fund construction of a new school for Westhaven and Fairley.

* Northside High School, which was on the chopping block for closure, was one of a few schools the board voted to keep open. They have a year to boost enrollment and academic achievement. Hopson said that could possibly be accomplished by boosting career and technology programs there in the hope of attracting back students. Currently, 300 students are zoned to attend Northside, but only 280 kids are enrolled there. Hopson said it’s important for that school to win kids back. If Northside doesn’t improve in one year, it will be forced to close, and Hopson said the board will be in talks with Memphis Housing and Community Development Director Robert Lipscomb about alternate uses for the building.

* Hopson said he’s still working on plan for what will happen to the nine school buildings that are closing next school year. He said some may be sold, and others may be released to charter schools.

On new schools:
* Hopson said they’ll be doing an analysis to determine if any neighborhoods could actually support more schools. He believes there’s a need to build a new school in southeast Shelby County and one near northwest Shelby County around the Bartlett area.

On the SCS cleaning contract:
* The new budget includes about $1 million more for a contract with cleaning company, GCA. Hopson said “It’s no secret there were a lot of complaints” about how well the company was cleaning schools in the past, and he blamed those problems on a staffing issue with the cleaning company. Budgeting more should pay for more workers to clean schools, he said.

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News News Blog

Parents, Students Speak Out About Possible School Closures

The atmosphere inside Shelby County Schools Frances E. Coe Administration building was more pep rally than public meeting on Thursday evening as parents and students from the 13 Shelby County Schools (SCS) that are being considered for closure chanted and displayed signs supporting their endangered school.

Schools that may close include Alcy Elementary, Riverview Elementary, Graves Elementary, Westhaven Elementary, Lanier Elementary, Corry Middle, and Riverview Middle in the southeast portion of the city. In the northwest, Gordon Elementary, Klondike Elementary, Shannon Elementary, Vance Middle, Cypress Middle, and Northside High may close.

Supporters of Westhaven protest the possibility of their school closing

  • Supporters of Westhaven protest the possibility of their school closing.

SCS superintendent Dorsey Hopson briefly addressed the standing-room-only crowd to explain why the schools may close and what parents can do to prevent some of the closings. He said the schools were chosen because of low enrollment and low academic achievement. Many of the schools on the list currently have less than 300 students. One example Hopson focused on was Northside High, which has 293 students enrolled even though the building has a capacity of 1,061 students. Westhaven only made the list because the building is falling into disrepair, according to Hopson, who said it was “coming up on not being safe for these babies to be in.”

“We will come to every one of these schools and have community forums inside these schools,” Hopson said. “We’re looking for ‘Does the community have a better plan than closing the school? Is there a community plan to increase literacy?’ You don’t need money [in the budget for parents] to volunteer to read to these babies.”

Hopson said some of the schools on the list may not close if the community can come together and improve academic performance through tutoring and other programs. He said SCS would try to come up with alternative uses for the buildings of schools that do end up closing.

“I know closing these schools will have a negative impact on the community. We will have to find other uses for those buildings,” Hopson said.

After Hopson spoke, parents, students, alumni, and other supporters of the endangered schools were invited to speak. In an eloquent and passionate speech, Gordon Elementary fourth-grader Daniel Peoples, the president of his class, told the room he was “sad and disappointed my school is on the list to close. In my opinion, that is a big mistake.”

His mother, Dena Peoples, spoke about how speech teachers at Gordon had worked wonders with Daniel. She said his last report card boasted straight A’s.

Jade Jordan, a third-grader at Westhaven, and state representative Raumesh Akbari shared a similar sentiment about Westhaven. Both said SCS should spend the money to renovate the building rather than closing the school.

“We want our school to remain open. Repair it. Restore it. Or renovate it. Don’t close Westhaven. Just fix it,” Jordan said.

And high school senior Sie Bradley made a plea for Northside High: “We may not have the largest school body, but we have one thing — the urge to learn.”

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Politics Politics Feature

The End of the Beginning

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

With the accession of the Germantown Board of Aldermen Tuesday night to an agreement with Shelby County Schools (SCS), the last domino would seem to have fallen in a three-year-old saga of public-school reorganization in Shelby County.

More remains to be done —much more, given that the already complicated process of merging the public schools of Memphis with those of suburban Shelby County, a feat accomplished for the current academic year, must be put in reverse in August to accommodate a myriad of separate school systems.

The largest of these will be Shelby County Schools, which will essentially consist of the former Memphis City Schools (MCS) area, plus unincorporated areas of Shelby County at large and minus a sizable number of inner-city institutions that will be part of the state-run Achievement Schools District.

Jackson Baker

Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy

What used to be known as Shelby County Schools is now destined to be a series of small school districts in suburban Shelby County within incorporated municipalities. Separate districts will be operated by Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, and Millington, with another one apparently to be administered jointly by Arlington and Lakeland.

In time, more inter-local arrangements could further link the new suburban districts administratively.

But within the week, a process which the Churchillian phrase “end of the beginning” might describe will apparently be accomplished.

The new Germantown School Board may or may not formally meet to ratify the agreement with SCS (its members have already acceded to it informally); the Shelby County Commission will have met to formally discharge its last remaining lawsuit, against Germantown, and presiding U.S. district judge Hardy Mays will have signed off on the end of litigation.

This last stage will be accomplished, appropriately, within hailing distance of December 20th, the third anniversary of the fateful vote on the old MCS board, which began the merger process.

• Germantown’s acceptance of the SCS terms, propounded more than a month ago by Superintendent Dorsey Hopson and his board, was fitted into the board of aldermen’s regular Monday night meeting, as add-on agenda item 5B.

Those terms, which involved the retention by SCS of three Germantown schools — Germantown High, Germantown Middle, and Germantown Elementary, which as a triad had a student population derived primarily from unincorporated Shelby County — had been a bitter bill and had been resisted during weeks of negotiation, but was finally swallowed by the board Monday night.

In introducing the resolution of agreement, Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy said, “It lays a foundation on which our new school district can be formed.”

The board members had met for an hour with attorneys “in a litigation session” just before the public meeting, Goldsworhty explained, and she made it clear that the bottom-line message they had gotten was: You have no choice. She spoke of the numerous counterproposals the city had made in vain to the SCS board and said she was “keenly aware” that the agreement did not “address all our concerns.”

As the mayor would put it in a brief encounter with the media after the meeting: “Clearly, the Shelby County School board, I think there is general agreement, is responsible, it owns the schools, it holds them in trust for the education of children. … Ultimately, you have to recognize that the decision rests more with the Shelby County School board than with our desire.”

In other words, though Goldsworthy pointedly eschewed any use of the metaphor, SCS held all the cards. After all the tension of negotiations with SCS during the last month, the 4-0 vote by the board, sans debate, was a surprisingly pro forma affair.  

In her conversation with the media, Goldsworthy was adamant that her city had fought the good fight: “Anybody who was a party to the negotiations knows that we did not roll over. We had completely and consistently asked for all eight schools, and we were willing to operate those in terms that we felt gave us an opportunity some time in the future to reexamine that.”

She spoke of having tried for a six-school option that left Germantown Elementary within the city’s own system but said “the other party,” SCS, would not agree on terms that were acceptable.

In the end, the new Germantown School Board had seen no alternative to accepting the agreement — which, as the mayor noted, at least allowed the city to move forward in creating a new school district for next year and the future beyond that — and neither had the city administration.

In the manner of the other five suburbs that had previously reached agreement with the SCS board, Germantown will acquire rights to five public schools through a process of making 12 annual payments — in Germantown’s case, at a rate of $355,453 per year, coming to something like $4.25 million.

As in the other cases, there is no one-to-one purchase arrangement. Technically, the money will be used to help offset SCS retirement obligations, while the deeds to school properties will be made over separately.

• Among several controversial matters scheduled to be taken up Wednesday in committee meetings of the Shelby County Commission will be one introduced by Republican member Wyatt Bunker expressing a position of “no confidence” in Rich Holden, current Shelby County administrator of elections.

Bunker, who was recently elected mayor of Lakeland and has tendered his resignation from the commission, effective January 3rd, said he had been encouraged to take the step by numerous Republican public officials and other prominent members of the GOP.

“This is long overdue, and it needed to come from the Republican side,” Bunker said. The oft-beleaguered Holden is a Republican who was appointed administrator by the GOP-dominated Shelby County Election Commission (SCEC) in 2009.

Bunker said he anticipated that a majority of his fellow commissioners, both Democrats and Republicans, would support his resolution. He acknowledged that some Republicans considered calls for Holden’s resignation to be the result of partisan Democratic pressure, but he said his own opinion, augmented by increasing dissatisfaction with Holden in GOP ranks, was that the administrator had to be held accountable for failure to stem a tide of election glitches that have occurred on his watch.

“If people were demanding that something be done after only six months or so on the job, you could say that was premature, that he should be given a chance, but he’s been there for five years, and the evidence is that he’s either unwilling or unable to do the job,” Bunker said.

The resolution of “no confidence” will be introduced in the commission’s general government committee on Wednesday, Bunker said, and will be accompanied by documentation from local and official state sources, including reprimands of the SCEC and its administrative arm by state election coordinator Mark Goins.

• Yacoubian Research, an established Memphis polling firm, has conducted what it said was an independent poll of likely voters regarding a Democratic primary contest in the 9th Congressional District between incumbent congressman Steve Cohen and his potential challenger, lawyer Ricky Wilkins.

The poll, involving some 204 respondents in the 9th District, found Cohen prevailing by a margin of 76 percent to 11 percent, with 13 percent expressing themselves as unsure.

A second question was asked of both 9th District voters and a sample of 414 Shelby County voters at large: “If Congressman Steve Cohen were to endorse a Democrat for Shelby County mayor against Republican Mark Luttrell, would this make you more likely or less likely to vote for him?”

Within the 9th District, 51 percent pronounced themselves “more likely,” as against 10 percent who said “less likely” and 39 percent who said there would be no difference. Percentages for the larger county sample were: 35 percent “more likely”; 26 percent “less likely”; and 39 percent no difference.

Cohen led Wilkins in all age, race, gender, and geographic groupings, with his greatest strength among African-American males (83 percent) and white females (88 percent). Wilkins is African-American.

In only one category, an infinitesimally small sample of Republicans intending to vote in the Democratic primary, did Wilkins lead Cohen. The vote there was 2 to 0.

Yacoubian’s conclusion: “In sum, Congressman Steve Cohen continues to be the overwhelming favorite in the August 2014 Democratic Primary for 9th District Congress.”

Categories
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.