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Opinion

Rick Masson Named Special Master

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Rick Masson, former chief administrative officer for the city of Memphis under Mayor Willie Herenton, has been named special master by federal judge Samuel H. Mays to oversee the merger of the Memphis and Shelby County school systems.

For three terms, Masson was Herenton’s “go-to guy” for major projects as well as the main contact with the Memphis City Council.

“Rick is an extremely capable executive who has had high level managerial experience in city government and on the board of MLGW,” said Herenton. “I have utmost confidence in Rick’s ability to lead this board through this merger.”

Herenton said Masson played a key role in the “complicated outsourcing of our I.T. (information technology) department)” and the establishment of annexation reserve areas with Shelby County municipalities in the 1990s when Jim Rout was county mayor.

“He’s been in complicated situations that will help him complete this merger,” said Herenton, who is hoping to start several charter schools under the new unified school system.

Like Mays, a White Station High School graduate in 1966, Masson has some connections to the MCS optional schools program. His son attended White Station when the Massons lived in the Evergreen neighborhood in Midtown.

Former City Councilman John Vergos, also a 1966 WSHS graduate, was delighted with the selection of Masson.

“He’s the kind of guy who would come into the office and put his feet up on the desk and talk about whatever was troubling you,” he said. “I was on the first council that majority African-American, and Rick had a reputation for being able to work with the administration and council.”

Vergos believes Masson has “a healthy skepticism about school budgeting and I think that is good in this situation.”

Masson’s selection was something of a surprise. Only last week he was announced as the newest “heavy hitter” addition to a local public relations and consulting firm, Caissa.

Mays listed eight duties of the special master.

1) To monitor the work of the Shelby County Board of Education as it makes the decisions necessary to transfer the administration of the Memphis City Schools to the Shelby County Board of Education;

2) To assist the Shelby County Board of Education and its staff in making decisions and in establishing and maintaining deadlines for decisions;

3) To ensure that the issues identified in the Transition Plan approved by the Transition Planning Commission and reviewed by the Commissioner of the Tennessee Department of Education are considered and resolved in a timely and appropriate way;

4) To work with the parties and the Tennessee Department of Education as necessary to provide that the rights of teachers are not impaired, interrupted, or diminished;

5) To work with the Shelby County Board of Education in establishing a practical budget for the combined school systems and with the appropriate parties to the Consent Decree that the budget is adequately funded;

6) To gather such information as may be necessary to implement the Consent Decree and to report to the Court orally or in writing, as may be necessary, considering always that time is of the essence;

7) To promote cooperation among the parties and among the members of the Shelby County Board of Education and to encourage voluntary compliance with the Consent Decree; and

8) To recommend specific action by the Court if decisions are not made or not timely made.

From the order: “The special master may communicate ex parte with the Court, with counsel, with representatives of any party, or with such other individuals as necessary to perform his duties. The Court appoints Rick Masson of Shelby County, Tennessee, as special master. Mr. Masson has experience in municipal administration and finance, the organization and management of nonprofit organizations, and strategic planning for public agencies. He will serve at the pleasure of the Court and be compensated at the rate of $250 an hour, plus expenses, payable monthly. His compensation will be paid one-half by the Memphis City Schools and one-half by the Shelby County Schools, as provided in the Consent Decree. He will assume his duties on the entry of this order. The special master is directed to take all appropriate measures to perform his assigned duties fairly and efficiently.”

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Opinion

Schools: Is It 1973 Again?

Samuel H. Mays Jr.

  • Samuel H. Mays Jr.

The short answer is “no” but there sure are some interesting parallels.

In 1973 and 1974, some 30,000 students left the Memphis public school system in white flight in reaction to court-ordered busing for integration. In 2013, some 30,000 students could leave the “unified” Shelby County schools to attend new municipal school systems, if the voters approve and the courts allow the establishment of such systems.

White flight cut the enrollment of MCS from 148,000 students to about 120,000 students. Five or six municipal school systems would cut the enrollment of the unified system from about 148,000 students to about 120,000 students.

A federal judge in Memphis is once again at the center of the story that is getting national as well as local attention. In 1973 it was Robert McRae — a Central High School graduate and Lyndon Johnson appointee who wore a red judicial robe and was capable of flashes of temper and impatience from the bench. In retirement, he joked that he was Central’s most famous graduate since Machine Gun Kelly. Now the judge of the hour is Samuel H. Mays, a White Station High School graduate and George H. W. Bush appointee whose low-key courtroom mannerisms are often as folksy and wry as they are wise.

Mays wrote last year’s order and consent decree on the schools merger and now faces a Shelby County Commission challenge to the scheduled August 2nd referendum on municipal schools. His ruling on “ripeness” last year invited such a challenge at a later date, and that time has come.

Mays, I believe, is the perfect person for the job. He graduated from White Station in 1966, smack in the middle of the one-grade-a-year desegregation plan that was scrapped in favor of busing. He is a graduate of Yale Law School in 1973, and had to have been aware of what was happening in his hometown and his high school alma mater. Most important, he has experience in the rough-and-tumble world of state politics as chief of staff for former Tennessee Gov. Don Sundquist.

Robert McRae

  • Steve Davis
  • Robert McRae

McRae kept a box of hate mail that he drew upon when completing his nine-part oral history for the Mississippi Valley Collection at the University of Memphis. I don’t know this for a fact, but I doubt that Mays gets much if any hate mail; he is rarely criticized in the thousands of online comments on schools stories I have seen.

I spent several hours interviewing McRae in his retirement. He was not a man to shirk a task, but he was a somewhat reluctant history maker and fully aware of the consequences of busing.

“I tried to stop with Plan A but the appeals court wouldn’t allow that,” he said in 1995. “I was disappointed in the reaction to Plan Z. But I had to keep a stiff upper lip because this [reaction] was an act of defiance. Still I was disappointed that we hadn’t come up with something that worked.

“No, I wouldn’t do it any other way. I am convinced there was nobody who could have settled this the way the parties were opposed. Somewhere along the line I became convinced that it was morally right to desegregate the schools.”

Plan Z, of course, was the “terminal” school desegregation plan, so named because McRae (who ate his own cooking by sending his children to Memphis public schools) didn’t want a succession of plans “A” through “Y.” But it was forever associated with one of its authors, MCS employee O.Z Stephens, who told me years later that “my identification with Plan Z killed me professionally in the school system.” His son David works for Shelby County Schools and has attended all of the meetings of the transition team and school board.

The senior Stephens thought busing was a disaster and has predicted that MCS charter surrender could also have dire consequences, but he is anything but a suburban firebrand or hater. He gave his working life to MCS and greatly respected both McRae and Willie Herenton, the superintendent during much of his tenure. McRae, he said, was “as easy on the school system and the city as he could possibly have been” and a less courageous judge could have passed the whole mess on to the appeals court.

For these and other reasons I am still somewhat hopeful about the schools merger. Pure conjecture on my part, but I suspect Mays is exercising as much judicial restraint as possible and well knows the limitations of a court-ordered “solution” to school desegregation and school system unification. He will let the political process play out as long as he can.

My attention span is not long, and I would rather walk on hot coals than sit through a five-hour meeting. But there is something positive and substantial in the Transition Planning Commission and, especially, the unified 23-member school board, even though it is not long for this world. Old white folks from the ‘burbs sit next to young black folks from Memphis, old black folks from the city sit next to young white folks from the suburbs; they look and listen, and speak their minds publicly. It’s hard to hate someone you’re sitting next to that long. John Aitken sits next to Kriner Cash and they occasionally share a private joke. Martavius Jones and David Pickler have probably spent more time together over the last two years than some spouses.

For this to transcend symbolism, both sides will have to compromise. The procedural shenanigans must end. We’re on the clock. MCS gave up its charter. Actions have consequences. I’m an Aitken fan, but that may be too much to ask, as even he knows, and he says he would willingly serve as an assistant superintendent. If Cash gets the job and really wants it, then I’m a Cash fan because I live in Memphis and want the city to prosper and personal differences don’t mean crap and I don’t believe in miracle-worker superintendents or 11th-hour national searches and Cash has the benefit of experience and knows the lay of the land.

Segregation is not the right word for what the muni’s are seeking. Legal segregation was the law in Robert McRae’s youth. Integration was the driving national force in Hardy Mays’ youth. Resegregation or de-facto segregation (and voluntary integration) is the driving force in Memphis (and many other big cities) in our time. But the suburban schools are not segregated in either a numerical way or a legal way, as the county commission’s filing this week states. There are certainly all-black schools. Southwind High School, which is almost all black, is the one I keep coming back to in my columns because it was such a calculated move when it was approved by the city and county school boards as a joint project. Federal Judge Bernice Donald almost forced the issue five years ago but she was overruled on appeal.

The next thunderbolt from federal court will have to account for the underlying factors that gave us a Southwind High School as well as, potentially, municipal schools. I think it has to come sooner rather than later. Ripe.

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Opinion

School Merger: Too Many Cooks and Nobody “Chopped”

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The schools merger needs a General Patton, or someone like him, to take command and give orders.

Maybe you remember the scene in the movie where George C. Scott as Patton comes upon a bunch of trucks and tanks gridlocked in the mud, and he wades into the mess, directs traffic, and pretty soon we’re back on the way to beating the Germans.

“I don’t want to get any messages saying that we are holding our position. We’re not holding anything. Let the Hun do that. We’re gonna go through him like crap through a goose,” Scott says in one of the great motivational speeches in moviedom.

Or maybe you’ve seen “Chopped,” the Food Network program in which four chefs compete before a panel of judges that chops one of them after each course. The chopped chef smiles in resignation and goes home.

And if cooking shows are foreign to you, then watch this clip from YouTube of variations of “sit down and shut up” in 70 movies.

We don’t need the menace or profanity, but the command and authority would be nice. This is not a drill. This is not a consultant’s report that can be put on a shelf and ignored, thank you very much. There is no do-nothing option and no going back to 2010 and separate city and county school systems. This is about payroll, school lunches, school bus schedules, attendance zones, and all the minutia of running a system that could potentially have 150,000 students and maybe 25,000 employees and impact everyone in Memphis and Shelby County as much as anything since the court-ordered busing and subsequent white flight of 1973. This is a big deal.

If the Transition Planning Commission’s plan isn’t accepted, then the unified school board will have to come up with something else, and that is like saying the students will decide what they want to do for the rest of the year. The 23-member school board is unstable, not mentally but structurally. There will be an election for seven positions in August, and in 2013 the board will shrink to the newbies and then possibly expand to up to 13 members.

The Tennessee state attorney general? Just another lawyer with an opinion, in the minds of some legislators and TPC members.

The superintendents? Neither one has been promised the job, and Kriner Cash is on the move.

The state legislature? A majority would vote for Tennessee seceding from Shelby County.

The Shelby County Commission or Memphis City Council? Please.

Our best hope is the TPC, with fresh guidance and affirmation from U.S. District Judge Hardy Mays via appointment of a special master — someone who can say, politely but firmly, get these trucks moving, you’ve been chopped, or sit down and shut up.

The TPC is facing a bear of a month of meetings in May to come up with a plan for a unfied system in June.
Most of these good and smart folks are volunteering their time, or their employers are donating their time. But it is the unified school board, according to Judge Mays’ ruling, that has the power for “making all transition decisions, operating the two separate school systems, and providing information to the Commissioner of Education.”

So far the special master that Mays spoke of in last order has not been appointed, and the TPC does not have the power to ask for one. I won’t pretend to understand the fine points of special masters, but it sounds to me like a good thing right now, or else we’re stuck in the mud.