Tag: Germantown Schools

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Politics Politics Feature

Getting the New Year Started

Raumesh Akbari (Photo: Senator Raumesh Akbari | Facebook)

State Senator Raumesh Akbari (D-29), who has had several star turns since her election to the state House in 2013, including prominent speaking roles at two consecutive national Democratic conventions, begins the new year with two fresh accomplishments.

Early in December, Akbari was elected vice president of the National Black Caucus of State Legislators. Later in the month, she was elected minority leader by her fellow Senate Democrats to succeed state Sen. Jeff Yarbro of Nashville.

Other Memphis legislators also advanced in both organizations. State representatives Antonio Parkinson (D-98) and Torrey Harris (D-91) were elected to the National Black Caucus executive committee, and London Lamar of Memphis (D-33), a former state representative, was named the Democrats’ caucus chair in the state Senate.

Akbari’s accession to the Democrats’ top state Senate leadership post complements the re-election of Memphis state Rep. Karen Camper (D-87) as the party’s leader in the House, where another Memphian, state Rep. Larry Miller (D-88), was named leader pro tempore for the Democrats.

• An important deadline is looming for the growing cast of hopefuls who aspire to succeed the term-limited Jim Strickland as mayor of Memphis in this year’s city election. January 15th is the prescribed date for candidates to file their first financial reports, and the results will constitute a true test of who is likely to make the long haul to the October election and who is not.

With this in mind, and with their recognition that the holiday season was making its own financial demands of their possible support bases, several of the candidates made it a point to hold fundraisers in the week or so before Christmas.

On the 11th, Van Turner, the former county commissioner and local NAACP head, was the beneficiary of a $100-a-head fundraiser. On the 15th, one was held for state Rep. Karen Camper, the Democrats’ state House leader. The hosts’ invitation specified that all donations were welcome, but $1,000 was more or less pinpointed as the top dollar.

A more ambitious ask of $1,600, the personal max, was suggested for attendees at an affair for Downtown Memphis Commission CEO/President Paul Young on the 18th, and two days later, on the 20th, Shelby County Sheriff Floyd Bonner was the beneficiary of yet another event, with $1,000 as the recommended donation.

Meanwhile, well-heeled businessman and former County Commissioner J.W. Gibson, who brings a pre-existing bankroll of his own, weighed in with the announcement that he would be a likely candidate.

The aforementioned January date will allow all the foregoing and other possible candidates to make an estimate of where each of them stands in the financial sweepstakes. A lot of money will be raised and spent in the mayoral election, but the supply of funding is ultimately limited, and a strong showing early is a good way to shake more dollars loose later on and to discourage one’s rivals.

For purposes of comparison, on January 15, 2015, then incumbent Mayor AC Wharton reported $201,000, and City Councilman Strickland, who would later triumph in a multi-candidate race, was right on Wharton’s heels with reported receipts of $181,000.

• The so-called “3 Gs” schools — Germantown High School, Germantown Elementary, and Germantown Middle School — saw their status transformed again a decade after they became part of the Memphis Shelby County Schools system. A complicated nine-year timeline, returning the elementary and middle schools to the Germantown system and allowing MSCS the right to sell the high school as part of a plan to build a new high school in Cordova, was approved by the four entities involved — Germantown Schools, MSCS, the city of Germantown, and the Shelby County Commission, with the only real dissension occurring on the latter body, which voted 8-5 to approve the arrangement.

“Shame on us,” declared County Commissioner Britney Thornton, a nay-voter.

The real mover in the deal was the Tennessee General Assembly, whose Republican supermajority, in obvious solidarity with Germantown, had passed a law requiring the re-transfer by year’s end.

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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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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 Viewpoint

Hopson’s Choice

On Monday, when Shelby County commissioner Chris Thomas decided not to offer his widely advertised motion for the commission to drop its litigation against the six suburban municipalities planning school systems, he was merely bowing to reality.

Several realities, in fact — beginning with the high probability that, even with the expected defection of Chairman James Harvey, a Democrat, from the ranks of lawsuit supporters, there was still a majority in favor of continuing with the lawsuit, consisting of six other Democrats and Republican Mike Ritz. That was enough to out-vote Thomas and the coalition of suburban Republicans that has steadfastly opposed the litigation. The best they could hope for was a 7-6 outcome against them.

Another reality confronting Thomas was last week’s unveiling by Dorsey Hopson, superintendent of the unified Shelby County Schools system, of a plan that resolved one basic issue in ongoing negotiations between the suburbs and the commission — that of who would administer to the unincorporated areas of Shelby County. Hopson’s answer was clear and categorical: The unified system would.

The superintendent’s plan also went far toward resolving the other basic question: What to do about the school properties within the six suburbs of Germantown, Collierville, Arlington, Lakeland, Bartlett, and Millington? Hopson’s choice was to insist on leasing the buildings to the municipalities — at a rate to be agreed on but one that, it was clear, would not be the nominal one desired by the municipalities.

As Hopson spelled that out Monday night, at the SCS board meeting that saw his plan overwhelmingly approved, the leases would be for 40 years, with all sorts of provisos regarding defaults and damages that put the onus of compliance on the suburbs.  

And, crucially, four schools on incorporated suburban turf would be retained by the united SCS system — Lucy Elementary School in Millington and three vintage institutions in Germantown: Germantown High School, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown Elementary.

As Germantown mayor Sharon Goldsworthy and others discovered when they appealed this verdict at Monday night’s SCS board meeting, there was virtually no chance of altering it. By state law, SCS is the official governing body for public education in Shelby County, it owns the school properties, and it has first dibs on their disposition. The rationale for selecting the particular four schools for retention by SCS was that the majority student population of each derived from the unincorporated areas, not from within the corporate limits of the host suburb.

Although Goldsworthy talked of conferring with her lawyers and continued to call for further discussions regarding the fate of the three Germantown schools — gaining a sliver of concession from Hopson that negotiations about the buildings (with him and board attorney Valerie Speakman) might conceivably touch on the issue — the chances of revision seemed remote.

The main reason for that was that no complaint was being heard from the other five affected suburban municipalities. Indeed, as SCS board member David Reaves of Bartlett explained somewhat apologetically when he declined Monday night to oppose the Hopson plan, “People in the north like this plan.” Mayor Mike Wissman of Arlington, a former board member and a bystander Monday night, confirmed that judgment.

The only board member voting against the Hopson plan was David Pickler, the former longtime chairman of the defunct all-suburban county school board, now a representative of Germantown. (And Collierville, too, though no grumbling about the plan was coming from that quarter.)

The once united front that could spur state Senate majority leader Mark Norris to seek remedial legislative action on behalf of the county’s suburban municipalities seemed irrevocably broken — a Humpty Dumpty that could not be patched back together.

It would appear that, after all the fire and brimstone and legislation and legal bickering, Hopson, the former attorney for Memphis City Schools and co-attorney for the provisionally unified system, had finally disposed of the central issues regarding the crisis-born school merger and the subsequent formation of municipal school systems. All that remains is some haggling over the cost of leasing school buildings.

Just in case, the county commission majority will almost certainly keep the existing lawsuit alive, though its linchpin, an accusation of resegregation, has been compromised somewhat by the Hopson plan’s de facto appropriation of minority students along Germantown’s unincorporated rim.

Presiding federal judge Hardy Mays, who has granted the litigating parties an additional 60 days to reach agreement, may soon be proclaiming an all-clear.

Jackson Baker is a Flyer senior editor.