Tag: Judge Hardy Mays

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Editorial Opinion

The Aftermath

On Monday, in the wake of a final dismissal of Shelby County’s long-running school litigation, there were cries of satisfaction from most of the parties who had taken part in the legal struggle. “Hallelujah!” Bartlett Mayor

Keith McDonald was quoted as saying — and perhaps he was entitled to such exultation. It was McDonald, after all, who had, early and often, carried the fight for municipal school independence on behalf of his and the five other suburbs — Germantown, Collierville, Arlington, Lakeland, and Millington.

No doubt he was entitled to celebrate. McDonald was, after all, a “winner” in the sense that his efforts had paid off and Bartlett had finally gotten its legal divorce from the school system of Memphis, after a merger of Memphis City Schools (MCS) with Shelby County Schools that the suburbs clearly regarded as unwelcome. Perhaps it should also be counted as a plus for Bartlett, as for the other suburbs, that each of them gets to chart its own course educationally, though the jury will stay out on that one for some years. Shelby County Commissioner Mike Ritz, a Germantown resident and a sometime banker, has warned that the long-term tax burdens on the suburban municipalities are likely to be overwhelming. Time will tell.

It is unlikely that Sharon Goldsworthy, the outgoing mayor of Germantown, felt quite as exhilarated as McDonald. The terms of the final settlement stripped her city of three flagship schools — Germantown High School, Germantown Middle, and Germantown Elementary — though that outcome owed a great deal to her own reluctance to offer long-term guarantees for servicing the student majority — residents of unincorporated Shelby County — at those schools.

Others who might not be so delighted about how things turned out might — or should — include Martavius Jones and Tomeka Hart, the Memphis school board members who took the lead in forcing the surrender of the MCS charter, thereby bringing about a “merger” that could not last — as well as the reemergence of separate city and county school blocs that are more unwieldy than the ones they replaced. Even if Jones and Hart won’t say as much, any number of other well-intentioned citizens who supported the charter surrender in December 2010 have been heard to lament the impossibility of putting the toothpaste back in the tube.

What about the 21 blue-ribbon citizens, members of the ad hoc Transition Planning Commission, who labored so diligently back in 2011-12 to bring forth a model merger document that was as roundly ignored and as impractical in the long run as a Constitution for the Republic of Atlantis? They surely can’t be celebrating.

A case can be made that the city of Memphis, by climbing out of a $58 million annual maintenance-of-effort obligation to the now defunct MCS, has come out a winner — as if any monetary gain could make much of a dent in the somewhat dire circumstances of city finances. And Memphis taxpayers, as citizens of Shelby County, will still have to shoulder the burden of that MOE.

Still, it’s over, and maybe in the long run it will all work out — though at the moment that seems to be a pretty hard sell.

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Editorial Opinion

Finals Prep

CREDIT: Danziger

Yes, it’s back-to-school time, and those teachers who survived a recent pruning of their ranks, no matter their brilliance, would be hard put to unravel a state of confusion which is bound to prevail in the minds of those — students, parents, fellow teachers, administrators, and just plain citizens — who will be interacting, one way or another, with the new unified Shelby County public school system.

The certainties regarding the new system are few, but one of them is that the system — in its current form, anyhow — is foredoomed to expire after a single year in existence. Two events have occurred this week that underscore the imminent and quite predictable dissolution of the system. One was the fact that Shelby County’s six suburban municipalities, fresh from voting (for the second year in a row) to create their own independent school systems, raced to pass ordinances enabling the next step — the election of their own school boards in November.

That means that, unless they run into further snags — legal, bureaucratic, or the financial ones predicted by outgoing Shelby County Commission chairman Mike Ritz — they will have opted out of the “unified” system by this time next year. No one has dwelled on it overmuch, but, when that happens, the problems associated with the de-merger, including the reshuffling of both students and teachers, may come to dwarf those which have bedeviled the much-plagued merger process.

Between now and then, there will be efforts by all parties to resolve several other unanswered questions, two of which loom foremost: How (if at all) and at what cost (if any) will the new suburban school systems acquire the use of existing school buildings, currently the property of the unified system? And who gets the students in the unincorporated areas of Shelby County, each of whom will bring state money into the receiving system, on a per capita basis?

Meanwhile, during the same week that municipalities prepared the way to elect their school boards, the Shelby County Commission ran afoul of various complications in deciding how to go about filling a single vacancy on the board of the unified system. (See Politics, p. 12.) That’s not even to mention the forthcoming legal wrangles over just who should be represented on the unified board when that board, as planned, expands from seven to 13 members this fall. It will be remembered that when the old Shelby County system, representing only those areas outside the city of Memphis, switched in the 1990s from an appointed to an elected board, the courts decided that only suburban voters should vote for board members. How will that precedent come into play a year from now, assuming a 13-member system is, in fact, created?

The headmaster who gets to resolve all this is, as always before in this merger process, presiding federal judge Hardy Mays, who will have to remember everything he ever learned in school — not just the legal stuff, but the math, the sociology, and the political science that are bound to underlie the ultimate solution. We wish him well in all his run-up tests and in the final exam itself, whenever and however that comes.

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Politics Politics Feature

The Memphis School-Merger Tangle: Cont’d.

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

The good news: One way or another, the complicated tangle of the city/county school merger process may get untangled this year. Federal, state, and local officials are working on it, though they seem to be working in different directions. That’s all part of the tangle, which could become even more snarled than it already is. And that’s the bad news.

After regular business had finished at Monday’s public meeting of the Shelby County Commission, Chairman Mike Ritz made this add-on announcement concerning a status conference held earlier that morning between U.S. district judge Hardy Mays and attorneys in the still ongoing litigation relating to city/county school merger and the prospect of independent municipal school districts:

“I did visit with the attorneys in the courthouse this morning, and the circumstances were these: A new party to the lawsuit was asked to attend the meeting. The county school board was not a party to the lawsuit, but they were asked to be there.

“And what happened was that the judge said he was going to postpone his decision on the two remaining issues and asked for a special master to be appointed, with names to be submitted no later than Wednesday to overlook the activities of the school board, because he is not happy with the failure of the school board to appoint a superintendent, to take budget actions, and otherwise respond to the recommendations of the TPC [Transition Planning Commission] — which he feels in toto is a failure to conform according to his order of 2011.”

Ritz added, “There is nothing for us to do or not do. We don’t have to like it or not like it, but there we are.”

Earlier, Tom Cates and Allan Wade, attorneys for the suburban municipalities and the Memphis City Council, respectively, had, in separate meetings with reporters, said essentially the same thing and with the same matter-of-factness as would Ritz.

“We all knew” that the municipalities would be in the Unified District for at least a year, said Cates, in what may have been his frankest acknowledgment yet of that particular reality mandated by Mays in separate orders of 2011 and 2012. And that, both he and Wade said, was all that was discussed.

Mays’ announcement of his imminent intent to appoint a special master resolves a matter that has been hanging since his original order of 2011, which mentioned such an office, and its most obvious intent is to dispose of the remaining financial and organizational obstacles to school consolidation in the face of an approaching July 1st merger deadline.

But, while it is generally being treated as a de facto delay in ruling on remaining legal issues, pending whatever the Tennessee General Assembly does on school matters in the current session, it takes those issues, including the final provision of the 2011 Norris-Todd Act and the very feasibility of independent municipal schools, to the brink of final judgment.

Hence a largely rhetorical discussion in Monday’s commission meeting on a resolution by Wyatt Bunker, Terry Roland, and Chris Thomas, proponents of municipal schools, to remove the commission as a litigating party and, in effect, terminate the lawsuit.

Bunker rolled it all into a single ball, beginning with a conclusion he said he reached as a member of the old Shelby County Schools board a decade ago. “We knew back then that city schools were top-heavy. There’s a lot of waste, a lot of waste in that administration,” and bringing things to the present, which included last weekend’s retreat attended by commission members, Unified School Board members, and other county officials. A major point of concern at the retreat had been the board’s request for extra funding.

“We get to that retreat this weekend, they hand us a 145 million-dollar bill. … That made me quite angry, because it appeared to me that they were trying to avoid making the tough decisions that they need to make and instead just hand us a bill. … That’s why the municipalities don’t want to have anything to do with it. … That begs the question, Why are we tying them up in a lawsuit? They need to seat their board. They need to hire a superintendent. They need to obtain the capital improvements to support their school system, put in place everything that’s necessary. … Why don’t we get out of the way and let them get on about the business of educating children?

“And for those of you who believe this is a race issue? By definition, Shelby County Schools is more diverse than Memphis City Schools is. It’s not a race issue. It’s a very diverse school system. It’s a high-achieving school system. … You ought to vote with us, get out of the way, and let them make progress.”

Jackson Baker

Roland: Nashville will act.

That was answered this way by Commissioner Walter Bailey:

“It takes two people to do a fox-trot. … If you don’t have an adversary, you don’t have a lawsuit. We’re asking them to concede the remaining issues, and the lawsuit will vanish. [We could] ask the court to enter the appropriate order. That would terminate the lawsuit. That would save hundreds of thousands of dollars. … That’s a quick remedy to end this lawsuit.”

And Commissioner Steve Mulroy segued from that into a reminder of the recently terminated mediation talks between the contending parties: “They’re saying it’s unreasonable to ask for a unilateral disarmament for their side. By the same token, it’s unreasonable to ask for a unilateral disarmament for our side. … The question is, Why won’t we talk and work out a settlement? … A mere three or four weeks ago, we were 90 percent of the way toward a complete local and comprehensive settlement.

“Abruptly, at the 11th hour, they walked away from the negotiations. And why? Because they had some sort of inkling that our Nashville overlords would meddle once again in our local affairs and give them everything they want.

“But,” Mulroy said, “there is a chance they won’t get every single thing they want out of Nashville. If we settle the lawsuit now, they won’t have to go to Nashville.”

The reported terms of what Mulroy referred to as an aborted agreement were essentially these: 10-year agreements between the suburbs and the commission permitting chartered school districts in six suburban municipalities; guarantees of racial diversity in the suburban schools; paid-lease agreements between the suburbs and the Unified School Board for existing school properties; and, in what seems to have been the sticking point, an agreement by the suburbs to equalize per-pupil spending with that of the unified system and to commit municipal sales tax revenues to that end.

In debate Monday, Roland responded, “Don’t say you ran away when you pushed [us] away.” He predicted that the General Assembly could make the local dispute moot by enacting legislation that would enable municipal schools and allow direct state funding of them, bypassing the county commission’s approval process.

Indeed, there are several measures tumbling around in Nashville at the moment, one or two that would legalize new municipal school districts, this time on a statewide basis, and others that would enlarge the state’s charter-school apparatus and create the kind of state control Roland spoke of. Last week, those measures drew opposition from representatives of the state’s Big Four school districts — Shelby, Davidson, Knox, and Hamilton counties — and reaction to them appears not to be predictably partisan.

Things remain to be seen up there, as, in fact, they do in Shelby County.

• Also on Monday: Inner-city Democratic commissioners Sidney Chism and Bailey joined with the suburban Republican bloc of Bunker, Roland, Thomas, Heidi Shafer, and Steve Basar to uphold the county’s existing residency requirements for Shelby County employees, a category that will now include those employees of Memphis City Schools, whose employer of record will be Shelby County after school merger becomes effective on July 1st.

The opposition of Chism and Bailey to an amendment that would have exempted the erstwhile MCS teachers was based on what Bailey referred to as a “freeloader” mentality on the part of people who work inside Shelby County but who pay their residence taxes elsewhere, a traditional inner-city view. Republican Shafer expressed similar views.

The ordinance, as passed, will give the affected teachers a five-year period to establish residence in Shelby County. However, the commission, by another bipartisan vote, this one going 9-4, passed a follow-up ordinance authorizing a 2014 ballot referendum abolishing the residency requirement for all county employees.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

Deal or No Deal?

CREDIT: Danziger

It being Thanksgiving week and all, it sure would be nice if we could add to our undoubted stock of blessings one more — an end to the seemingly interminable standoff regarding local education.

As we go to press, the various parties to the litigation regarding the future of six proposed suburban school districts are involved in a mediation process convened by presiding U.S. district judge Hardy Mays. And it is highly unlikely that any resolution will come of the process until next week. Monday, perhaps, or Tuesday the 27th, the date set by Mays as the end for mediation.

At the risk of being superseded by events (the next print edition of the Flyer won’t hit the streets until Wednesday the 28th, although we’ll be posting online), we would assume that, failing a mediated resolution of differences, Mays’ long-awaited verdict in the case will also be forthcoming that week. The Shelby County Election Commission will meanwhile have met on Monday the 26th to certify the November 6th election results, which involve school board elections in the six suburbs — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Arlington, Lakeland, and Millington.

Compromise would appear difficult. It’s like in the case of pregnancy: You either are, or you’re not. Similarly, there either will be a Unified School District encompassing public schools throughout Shelby County, or there won’t.

Nevertheless, and though all the parties to the litigation — city, county, and state — have conscientiously obeyed the Omerta imposed on the process by Mays, effectively shutting off the usual flow of info-leaks, some inkling of a possible agreement has floated out from other sources. For one, there’s David Pickler, the former longtime president of the old Shelby County Schools board. It is Pickler’s espousal of special-school-district status for the then suburban system that is credited by some as the proximate cause of the Memphis City Schools board’s decision to surrender its charter and force merger.

Ironically enough, Pickler now serves on the Unified board as the representative for Germantown and Collierville, though he makes no secret of his continued support for municipal school independence. What he now suggests is that, in return for the plaintiffs (the Shelby County Commission, the Memphis City Council, and the city of Memphis) dropping their suit, the suburban municipalities might delay the start of their school systems — now scheduled for August 2013, when merger takes place — until later: 2014, maybe, or even 2015. The question of how to make over existing school buildings, and at what cost, could be worked out later. (The fact is, state senator Mark Norris, author of the legislation allowing for the suburban districts, would likely wave his magic wand again on their behalf.) Recipe for a deal?

Stir in these other relevant — and universally known — facts: 1) One way or another, the suburbs will have their own schools — by the charter route, if necessary; 2) The case for constitutionality of Norris’ enabling legislation would appear fatally weak, inasmuch as it was demonstrably crafted for Shelby County only; 3) Nobody really wants to go on to a phase two of trial, devoted to the messy issue of alleged resegregation.

However all of this cooks up is anybody’s guess. But at any rate, Happy Thanksgiving!