Tag: Kriner Cash

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Opinion

Public School Escape Hatches

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What do a star football player at St. George’s private school, Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald, State Education Commissioner Kevin Huffman, and former mayor Willie Herenton have in common?

They’re all threats to the future consolidated Memphis and Shelby County public school system, which is going to be riddled with escape hatches that could potentially draw away tens of thousands of students and the state dollars that go with them.

Omar Williams, pictured in The Commercial Appeal today, is a running back at St. George’s who transferred from Manassas High School. He is one of several black athletes who have gone from Memphis public schools to private schools such as St. George’s, Briarcrest, and MUS. The best known include Elliot Williams, who went to St. George’s before playing basketball at Duke and Memphis, and Michael Oher, who went to Briarcrest before starring at Ole Miss and in the NFL. Competitive private schools welcome such student athletes — and some of their non-jock classmates — for reasons of altruism, diversity, and winning championships. Recruiting is not just for colleges. Look at all the University of Memphis basketball players who went to private academies whose specialty is prepping the cream of the crop for careers at Division 1 powerhouse schools and, perhaps, the NBA. I’m surprised Memphis doesn’t have such an “academy” for jocks right here at home already.

Keith McDonald is the most prominent no-ifs-ands-or-buts-about-it proponent of separate suburban school systems. Bartlett, Germantown, Collierville, and Millington are all studying the prospects. That represents a potential loss of tens of thousands of students to the consolidated Shelby County system two years from now.

Charter schools are a third escape hatch. The joint school board this week denied new applications, but the board and MCS Superintendent Kriner Cash seem to have a different point of view than Education Commissioner Huffman. See Jackson Baker’s blog post here.

Herenton is one of the applicants for multiple charter schools. He told me Friday he has appealed the denial of his application to the state treasurer’s office, which will look at the impact on finances. A decision is expected in a month. If the treasurer rejects the school board’s claim that charters adversely effect budgets, then Herenton will appeal to the education commissioner, who could direct the school board to approve the application.

“The unified board has not adequately read the future of the Memphis and Shelby county public school system,” Herenton said. “They have not accepted that the educational arena is going to change even more dramatically n the future. MCS has been a colossal failure in terms of educating the children in the inner city and in poverty. Parents, students and teachers deserve the opportunity to participate in a variety of programs.”

Herenton is a former MCS superintendent. Asked what he would do today if he was in Kriner Cash’s shoes, he said “if educators and board members are really concerned about improving academics, then they shouldn’t care who is given leadership. They have to put children first, but they have put their own interests first.”

Cash and board members say they are just trying to operate within their budget, and they have to employ roughly the same number of people and cover the same overhead, at least in the short run, despite the influx and outflow of students.

They’re fighting on multiple fronts. It sometimes looks like a rearguard action because charters have by and large avoided close scrutiny and get pretty good press in Memphis and Nashville.

But setting up a new school much less a new system is hard and expensive. Sooner or later, MCS/SCS will have to stop playing defense and go on offense — in other words, make the positive case for a big unified school system with veteran teachers, principals, coaches, marching bands, extracurricular activities, no tuition, proud tradition, bus routes, neighborhood identity, stability, whatever. The appeal will have to be “why you should choose us” not “why you should not be allowed to leave us.”

Once deregulation begins, there is no stopping it. There is a very good chance that the future consolidated system could become the current MCS system, minus hundreds if not thousands of its most athletic, college-bound, and motivated students and parents. That’s the thing about escape hatches.

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Opinion

Is The City Council Anti-Education? Short Answer: No

CREDIT: Murray Riss

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Some people think the current Memphis City Council is anti-Memphis City Schools, maybe even the most anti-MCS ever. I disagree. Here are six reasons why.

Disclaimer: There is a human tendency to say someone is “best” “worst” “smart” or “idiotic” depending on whether they agree with you. This is especially true of the City Council. But whether the council is MCS-friendly or MCS-unfriendly is subject to fairly objective measurements.

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Opinion

Schools Merger Up to Judge Mays Now

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No guns, no sex, no stolen cash, no cops. Just a stack of holiday homework for U.S. District Judge Samuel H. Mays that may be the most important federal court case in Memphis in decades.

All of the parties in the schools merger case filed their final briefs on Thursday, setting the stage for Mays to decide when and how the Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools will be consolidated. The question of “if” seems moot since everyone agrees it’s going to happen sooner or later.

There are seven players in the game. Their briefs total 180 pages, plus a few hundred pages of supporting exhibits. Not exactly a full-employment act for lawyers, but a pretty good lick. Judge Mays says he will make a ruling with dispatch.

Here is a summary of the final positions. At stake: the future of two school systems with roughly 150,000 students, one (Memphis City Schools) overwhelmingly poor and black, average ACT score 16.6, and one (Shelby County Schools) majority middle-class and affluent and racially mixed, average ACT score 21.

The legalistic blah-blah about special school districts is not mere semantics. The underlying issue is who gets the bill for paying for MCS, which has a 2011 budget of $1,196,364,127. Presently, 6% comes from the city of Memphis, 30% from Shelby County, 38% from the state, 21% from federal government, and 5% from other local sources. The city council wants to get out from under the financial obligation but has booked a 18-cent property tax hike just in case. When the systems are consolidated it is possible that there will be one countywide tax for schools, not a separate tax in Memphis in addition to the county tax.

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Opinion

Is It Worth It?

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The slogans and yard signs have come out. “If You Don’t Know Vote No.” And “Unity.”

I think the “don’t know” one is more effective. The anti-merger side has the easier job. Lots of doubts. The fact is nobody knows the answer to a dozen big questions. The pro-merger side has to choose between the symbolic feel-good message — unity — or the financial message — lower taxes — which is not at all certain.

Slogans aside, another way to look at the schools referendum is to ask this question: Is it worth it?

To answer that, we need to look at what can be changed and what cannot be changed by surrendering the MCS charter and merging the city and county school systems. And then we need to ask if the things that can be changed are more likely to be changed with or without a merger.

First, here’s what I think can be changed:

The discussion. In 29 years in Memphis, I have never seen anything close to this much interest, publicity, serious discussion, and mixed alliances as I have seen in the last four months on the schools issue.

The tax imbalance between Memphis and the suburbs. Sooner or later Memphis will go bankrupt if a shrinking tax base has to support more services, and residents can opt to live in a neighboring suburb where the taxes are 20-40 percent less. It may be a slow death, but I don’t think this can be avoided without consolidation.

School system and school district boundary lines can be redrawn. It’s been done many times already, it just has not been implemented.

School board membership can change and the size of the board can be increased and the district lines can be redrawn.

Superintendents can be changed, just like coaches. Buyouts and hurt feelings come with the territory. If you are a Kriner Cash fan, vote “no” on school consolidation. Otherwise he’s out of here within a year or so.

Openness and accurate, audited numbers. Taxpayers should not have to pay for phantoms. Audit the enrollment and the graduation rate, and the academic outliers. No shenanigans.

The acceptance of an ACT average score of 14, 15, 16, or 17, which is what most city high schools produce. A high school that boasts of increasing its graduation rate with graduates who make a 15 on the ACT— six points below the state average — is cheating those students and setting them up for failure.

The “Us and Them” reporting and grading system that makes Shelby County look so much better than MCS. Blended scores are the rule in Nashville, Chattanooga, and Knoxville.

The uncertainty about what Memphians want. This is a city-only referendum. The turnout and the margin and the result will tell us something.

What can’t be changed:

School choice. The choices are much broader than city schools or county schools. There are tens of thousands of kids in private schools in Shelby County and tens of thousands more in public schools in DeSoto County, Mississippi, minutes away. MCS has an open enrollment policy. And now MCS also has a couple dozen charter schools. The strongest force in the universe is a parent determined to get their kid into a good school. Boundaries are nothing.

Resegregation. There are not enough white kids in the combined city and county system — about 32,000 out of 150,000 — to have racially balanced schools. Racially unbalanced schools are a fact of life here. With a merger we might have unity in the sense of one public system instead of two, but probably not for long once municipalities set up their own systems, which I think they would do.

In-fighting on the school board. A bigger board would have fresh faces but democracy guarantees diversity and disagreement.

The suburban dominance of the state legislature. They have the numbers.

A long and difficult transition. A merger of two public school systems is not at all like a corporate merger. There are no lines of authority. No super CEO. No handpicked board. Nobody with a mandate to close schools and cut jobs.

The achievement gap between the very best schools and the worst schools. There will be and there should be a few college-prep public high schools like White Station, Houston, Collierville, and Central. That’s smart policy for any school system, and it recognizes the clustering effect. It is simply not realistic to expect disadvantaged city schools to close the gap with White Station or Houston.

In summary, I think voters will be asking themselves what a merger can and cannot do, and whether some desirable results are more likely to be achieved with or without a merger. The outcome will influence what suburban residents and the courts do.

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Opinion

Germantown: Your Turn on Schools

David Pickler

  • David Pickler

This should be good. There’s a meeting at Germantown City Hall at 7 p.m. tonight to talk about schools. I don’t think they’ll be booing David Pickler and Mark Norris.

What snow? As of noon Monday, it was game on. With timely action on a schools bill expected in Nashville today, and possibly some court filings, counter-moves, or shenanigans elsewhere, there will be fresh red meat for a big crowd meeting on its home court in the belly of the beast.

It was a quiet weekend here in Lake Wobegon, also known as Midtown. The Super Bowl took airtime and print space and blogosphere energy from the schools story, which I sense is testing the patience and attention span of everyone involved in it. Sort of like the Black Eyed Peas halftime show.

And I think that is part of the strategy of merger opponents. Killing with delay, kindness, and confusion is a time-tested winner.

That goes for the white men in suits and boots in Nashville who dominate the legislature and the governor’s office. As my colleague Jackson Baker has described in detail, Norris brilliantly crafted a bill that can and will be seen as giving away a lot while actually giving away very little, and assuring special school district status for Shelby County down the road, if not sooner.

Delay worked for annexation opponents a few years ago when Memphis was on the verge of taking in Southwind and a bunch of schools in southeastern Shelby County. The neighborhoods avoided higher taxes, and the county school system avoided losing so much of its black population that it’s lopsided racial imbalance might have drawn renewed interest from the federal courts. Southwind is supposed to come into the city of Memphis in 2013. Where have we heard that year before? Oh yes, its the year that the city and county school systems will merge in Norris’ bill. We’ll see.

Delay works for Memphis City Schools Superintendent Kriner Cash. He can never seem to come up with numbers when the media and elected officials need them, whether it’s the enrollment, the number of kids who fail to start school until after Labor Day, or the number of pregnant girls at Frayser High School. He talks vaguely about closing some schools, but doesn’t look ready to identify specific schools on the chopping block. “Right-sizing” MCS is off the table at least until the referendum.

Last Thursday the Memphis City Council delayed, for a week, finalizing its support of surrendering the MCS charter. Harold Collins was pushing for final action, and when I saw him later that evening at a public meeting at Whitehaven High School he looked visibly distressed at the ability of Norris to persuade some city council members of his honorable intentions.

“Do you really trust him?” he asked me. Hey, I’m the one who gets to ask the questions.

I told Collins I thought he had no choice but to wait, given that five other council members — all the white guys, at that — were going to vote against it. Not a good outcome. Collins glumly agreed. The trouble is that the council’s “nuclear” option may now be the nuclear dud. Defused. Outfoxed. Killed with kindness and confusion.

I disagree with some of my media colleagues who suggested that the moratorium on March 8th may be irrelevant. Symbolic is not the same as irrelevant. It is good to engage people, good to know how Memphians feel, good to follow through with what the school board started on December 20th, good to play by the rules. A split vote for surrender on the school board followed by a split vote for surrender on the city council without a referendum would have been a disaster.

Better to keep talking, have the referendum, get a big turnout, see what happens, then argue about what it means.

I ran into civil rights lawyer Richard Fields Saturday. He said he plans to file a lawsuit to enjoin the state from taking any action. Fields has the bona fides on this issue. We will see. If he does something, we shall report it.

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Opinion

Leaning “Undecided”

Heading into the backstretch of the School Systems Derby, it’s Undecided pulling even with Pickler Pony and Hart of Jones.

At least that’s how I see it. The more I read and hear, the less I know about this big space-eater of a story. Pollsters like to talk about which way the “undecideds” are leaning. I see “ayes” and “nays” leaning “undecided.”

Three weeks before early voting might begin in a Memphis referendum, Tennessee lieutenant governor Ron “Blountville Knows Best” Ramsey says not so fast. His arrogance could make merger opponents reconsider. Former mayor and superintendent Willie Herenton says it’s about time Memphis came around to an idea he has been pushing in one form or another for 17 years. Perhaps, but his association with it might not help. Memphis City Schools superintendent Kriner Cash says stay the course. Mayor A C Wharton says how about that Electrolux deal?

Have you noticed … how closing half-empty MCS schools went from an idea whose time has come to an idea nobody talks about any more?

Or that merger proponents continue to talk about a Shelby County special school district as if it could be financially independent of Memphis even though that is very unlikely, given that Memphians are a majority on the Shelby County Commission?

Or that 12 public schools in Shelby County are in no-man’s-land, also known as the Memphis annexation area, and nobody knows if or when they will shift from SCS to MCS? If these 12 schools and their 7,656 black students are absorbed by MCS, then SCS will lose 40 percent of its black enrollment.

Or that Cash recently tossed out some numbers from an inner-city school that look as fishy as Derrick Rose’s SAT score?

As for Ramsey and Herenton: Ramsey knows nothing about MCS; Herenton has forgotten more about MCS than most of the rest of us will ever know. At Hollywood Community Center last week, he made a pitch for MCS charter surrender and reminded everyone that in 1993 he suggested that the whole city surrender its charter because, “I did not want my city of Memphis to become another Detroit.” Over the next 15 years, Herenton pitched consolidation in one form or another at least a half-dozen times.

No urgency, no action. Ideals are not the same as outcomes. The most complete analysis of possible outcomes is a 2008 University of Memphis study. There are two big “ifs.” One is how much territory and how many of those 12 schools in Southwind, Cordova, and northwest Shelby County Memphis takes over. The other big “if” is how schools are funded and whose taxes go up and down. State funding is a given. So is county funding, under current law. Special school districts like Memphis and, perhaps, Shelby County can impose an additional property tax.

In the worst case for Memphis and best case for the suburbs, county government would stop using property taxes to fund schools, and each district would fund itself. In that case, the imbalance of Memphis and suburban taxes would get even more out of whack.

Finally, there is the story of the remarkable improvements in achievement scores and the graduation rate at Booker T. Washington High School. Cash said BTW achieved a graduation rate of 82 percent and outperformed Central High School in reading and math and is “within a couple points of White Station High School.”

The inner-city school lost enrollment when the neighboring housing projects were torn down. By 2005, it had fewer than 700 students and a graduation rate of 52 percent. From 2005 to 2009, its graduation rate ranged from 52 percent to 60 percent. But in 2010, the rate soared 22 points. No other city high school has improved so much so fast. Statistical outliers like that are usually due to a change of population. BTW went from 629 students in 2009 to 549 last year. We can assume it wasn’t the top students who left.

On the Tennessee Report Card, BTW does outscore Central in the percentage of students achieving proficiency in math, 52 percent to 46 percent. But Central and White Station, optional schools with more than 1,700 students each, score much higher in every other category. White Station has an average ACT composite score of 23 compared to 14 for BTW.

My point is not to beat up on BTW. Comparing it to an optional school is unfair. My point is that dramatic success stories must be verifiable and replicable. This one isn’t.

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Editorial Opinion

First Report

In time-honored tradition, it is time for the first six-weeks’ grade report on the newest student to hit the Memphis educational scene. That would be Kriner Cash, a transfer from Miami, Florida, and, it would appear, a quick study.

First, how did the new superintendent do in his entry-level course, Introduction to Memphis 101? He seems to have learned fast, accommodating himself not only to the political structure in these parts but, in one of his earliest innovations — a proposal to break up the school district into four administrative areas — borrowing a useful holdover idea from the regime of the city’s current mayor, onetime superintendent Willie Herenton. It’s probably a good idea in itself and indicative of a sense of diplomacy which will serve Cash well in years to come. Herenton, a disappointed suitor for the job who once lumped Cash into a class of applicants he called “third-rate,” was able to do some sincere bragging about the new man. At the very least, that will stave off what many see as an inevitable clash until such time as the superintendent has his feet firmly on the new earth he inhabits.

On the other hand, Cash’s quick hire of a former mayoral intimate, David “Smokey” Gaines, as MCS athletic director raised eyebrows — especially since the holder of the job, the well-respected Wayne Weedon, had to be shoved aside to accommodate Gaines. That, plus Cash’s importation from Miami of new MCS security chief Gerald Darling, who had been cited for a sex-scandal cover-up by a Florida grand jury, engendered fears that Cash might be seeing overly eye-to-eye with Herenton, who is more or less constantly being charged with cronyism.

There’s a plus side to that if it indicates Cash understands the nature of his new turf. In recent remarks to the Memphis Rotary Club, the new superintendent assailed what he saw here as “a culture of failure” and promised to remedy it by, among other things, finding new ways to institutionalize the role of fathers and father figures in the school system. Also promising was Cash’s pledge to aggressively pursue the involvement of qualified adults as tutors.

Cash seems to understand that MCS’ over-large corps of over-age students — those who have repeatedly failed annual promotion — is at the core of performance by the whole student population. He proposes to target these students for a mixture of stern discipline, countertruancy measures, and hands-on incentives. Meanwhile, he will encourage mainline students to achieve results by providing exhibitions and other opportunities for superior work on their part to be displayed to the public.

All students will have to toe the line on dress codes and cell-phone use. While we have reservations about the latter policy, we recognize that some students are trafficking in something other than educational ideas, and banning the phones may be a prerequisite to getting that problem under control. And we were struck by his proposal to outfit schools with wardrobe closets so that students who come to school with ill-fitting garments will be forced to shed them and climb into something else that, Cash said, “is the right size.”

Is Cash himself the right size? The answer to that will determine his final grade. Meanwhile, we’ll give him an Incomplete. And we’re optimistic about his progress.

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News The Fly-By

Compromise Concerns Cash

New Memphis City Schools superintendent Kriner Cash may have initially said he could figure out a way to live with the City Council’s $66 million budget cut. But Thursday, August 14th, at a public meeting held at Bridges U.S.A. in Memphis’ Uptown neighborhood, the superintendent was singing a different tune.

Whatever may have been said in the past, it’s clear that the superintendent and his team have determined that MCS needs the city funding commitment, not just this year, but in perpetuity.

Cash referred to a gloomy PowerPoint presentation and said that without the additional funding, jobs would be lost, textbooks won’t be replaced, initiatives won’t be launched, and significant additional cuts will have to be made in years to come as the system fails to meet its state-mandated cash reserves.

Cash justified six-figure salaries offered to new hires by saying the generous salaries were market value. He also said that a majority of the job cuts would come from the system’s main office and administration.

The superintendent’s presentation assumed yearly increases in operating costs though school enrollment has been in decline.

The proposed compromise between the city and the school system is, quite literally, passing the buck.

The school district would transfer $57.5 million from its reserves to the city, an amount the council says it’s owed for debt-service on bonds it issued for the system. The city would then give the $57.5 million back to the school system, which would allow the district to balance its 2008-2009 budget.

The problem, according to MCS, is that the one-time transfer doesn’t replace the funding stream the school district loses if the council continues to withhold funding in the future.

If projections are correct, MCS could witness a budget shortfall of $14 million by 2010.

The dialogue between city officials, school district personnel, and the public was hampered by a series of ground rules designed to allow such a meeting in light of a pair of lawsuits the city and the school district have filed against one another.

At press time, the City Council’s budget commitee had approved the compromise and sent it on for a full council vote.

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Opinion

Back To School

City and county public schools opened this week, and students aren’t the only ones who could use an orientation.

Kriner Cash, his staff, and members of the Memphis City Council and school board should climb on a yellow bus and check out three new high schools their predecessors left them — and taxpayers — at a cost of nearly $100 million.

Each of the schools — Southwind High School, Douglass High School, and Manassas High School — comes with the latest furnishings and technology and some important unfinished business. Taken together, they offer a lesson in school choice, city-county politics, urban renewal, flight from the inner city, and the underpinnings of the current conflict between the Memphis school board and the City Council.

Southwind, located in an unincorporated area of suburban sprawl between Germantown and Collierville, opened in 2007 as a Shelby County school but will become a city school when Memphis completes a politically touchy annexation of the adjacent area. The school has 1,484 students this fall in grades 9-11 and will add the 12th grade in 2009. More than 90 percent of the students are black. U.S. district judge Bernice Donald has ordered Shelby County Schools to make all of its schools within 15 percent of the system’s overall 35 percent minority enrollment. The school system has appealed the order, and a decision is expected later this year.

Manassas, which opened in January, is in a blighted neighborhood near the abandoned Firestone manufacturing plant about two miles north of downtown. Famous as the city’s original high school for African Americans, Manassas graduated just 38 students in 2007 before the new building was completed. Capacity is 800 students. Current enrollment is just over 500, according to Principal Gloria Williams.

Douglass, located in a hardscrabble industrial area of North Memphis dotted with small businesses on Chelsea Avenue and single-family homes, is one of the feel-good stories of the year. It was closed in 1981 and rebuilt in 2007 and 2008. On Monday, alumni from as far away as California came to a 7 a.m. dedication ceremony called “Coming Home and Giving Back.”

“It’s all about school and community pride,” said Principal Janet Ware Thompson.

Completion of the gym and auditorium are behind schedule, however, and the school opened Monday with about 350 students, well below its capacity of 800 students.

Douglass and Manassas are touted as prototypes of smaller neighborhood high schools. Their revival is due to dedicated alumni and political muscle. Former Memphis school board member Sara Lewis championed Manassas, her alma mater, and city councilman Barbara Ware, a Douglass graduate, did the same for her old school. Even if Douglass and Manassas reach their capacity, their enrollment will be about a third of the largest and most overcrowded high schools in Memphis — Cordova and White Station — which each had more than 2,200 students last year.

Southwind is likely to be at its capacity of 2,000 students by 2009. Super-sized Southwind sprawls across a 62-acre site jointly approved in 2006 by the city and county school boards and purchased for an eye-opening $5.2 million. At 325,000 square feet of space, Southwind is tied with its design twin, Arlington High School, as the biggest public school in Tennessee. Neighboring subdivisions along Hacks Cross and Shelby Drive boomed before the subprime mortgage crisis came along and are still marked by signs that say “NO CITY TAXES.”

Most City Council members and MCS leaders were not in office when construction of these three schools was approved. Cash succeeded former Superintendent Carol Johnson in July. Nine of the 13 members of the City Council are newcomers this year, and that number will rise to 10 when Scott McCormick resigns in two weeks. Former school board member Wanda Halbert moved over to the City Council, and Lewis was named to a full-time city job.

At a Southwind High ribbon-cutting ceremony last week, there was little recognition of its city-county parentage. City officials were invited, but only school board member Betty Mallott showed up. The City Council voted against completing annexation of the Southwind area in 2007 (shopping centers and commercial areas have been annexed but not schools and houses), and another push could be five years away, according to Shelby County Schools superintendent Bobby Webb.

The Central Nutrition Center is the symbol of excess in Memphis City Schools. But pricey catering and spoiled food are small potatoes compared to the cost of new high schools. Shelby County, with city and county tax money and the blessing of the Memphis school board, built near suburban subdivisions where population is increasing. MCS builds in declining neighborhoods as a catalyst for redevelopment. Either way, it’s an expensive proposition.

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Politics Politics Feature

Herenton After Hours

CREDIT: by Jackson Baker

Mayor Willie Herenton, known for his big plans and numerous controversies during the almost 13 years he has served as Memphis mayor, is famous within journalistic ranks for his candor. Though he can be as reticent as any other public figure in formal settings, even defiantly so on particularly sensitive subjects, the mayor can dish with the best of them when he wants to.

Herenton was in such a mood last Thursday night when, after arriving late at a fund-raiser at downtown’s Joysmith Studio for his friend, Shelby County commissioner Deidre Malone, he let himself go a little with a handful of attendees. Asked about the unfounded rumor that went around, and kept going around, two weekends ago, concerning what was supposedly his imminent indictment on federal charges, the mayor made no secret of his exasperation at the willingness of people, especially the media, to believe anything and everything about him.

“It’s unbelievable what they say!” Herenton exclaimed. He recalled another widespread rumor several years ago. “They said I was at Betty Ford and claimed they couldn’t find me. Well, all they had to do was look. I was in my office working!”

At the time, E.C. Jones, then a councilman from District 1, which cuts a swath across the city’s northernmost precincts from Frayser to Cordova, went public with his concerns that Herenton was nowhere to be found.

“Couldn’t find me!” the mayor expostulated. “Well, he could have found me if he wasn’t … .” Here came one or two unflattering epithets. The mayor went on. “He could have found me if he’d had enough sense to ride the elevator up two floors, from five to seven, and just look around.”

Herenton was dismissive about current suspicions that he was behind the surprise firing by new superintendent Kriner Cash of the Memphis school system’s former longtime athletic director, Wayne Weedon, and his replacement by David Gaines, who was once a basketball teammate of Herenton’s at LeMoyne-Owen College. “Is ‘Smokey’ Gaines an old friend of mine? Yes. Was he a treasured teammate of mine? Yes. Did I have anything to do with getting him hired? No. I never said a word about the matter. That was Kriner Cash all the way.”

(For the record, Cash has since complained that a recent, highly positive performance review had been missing from Weedon’s file when he reviewed it and indicated he thought the matter deserved to be investigated. Weedon is meanwhile on “special assignment.”)

The mayor offered an opinion on another issue, the sponsorship of potential referendum proposals to require City Council approval of city contracts and second-level mayoral appointments by Barbara Swearengen Wade, long presumed an unswerving Herenton loyalist. He saw it as a matter of payback. “I think she was perturbed by my support of changing police residency requirements,” said Herenton, who has favored a variety of proposals to expand the geographical areas from which police recruits can be drawn.

The mayor shrugged. “She feels very strongly that all city employees should reside in the city. I respect that, but I just need — the city needs — police officers, and we have to do what we have to do to attract them.”

Though Herenton was ostensibly in a lighthearted, jesting mood, the concerns of office dominated his conversation at the fund-raiser. Reminded of his teasing suggestion on two recent public occasions that he might choose to seek a sixth term, the mayor let his wide grin settle into a wan smile, then disappear altogether. “No,” he said. “No, it’s just too much … ” Momentarily he searched for the right word, then said it, softly and almost inaudibly, “… stress.”

Weighing Shelby’s Vote

• Though few people not in their dotage or approaching it can recall it, there once was a time when the phrase “Solid South” was used to describe the voting habits of the sprawling area coinciding more or less with the limits of the old Confederacy. The era of Democratic supremacy dated more or less from a decade or two before the Civil War through the election of President John F. Kennedy in 1960, when the majority of voters in every Southern state were so reliably Democratic that the phrase “tantamount to election” was used to describe the results of party primaries.

Now, of course, the voting habits of the South have largely flipped, and Republicans dominate the region’s vote — at least in presidential and major statewide elections. The one remaining place on the face of the earth that, in golf terms, has continued to be such a “gimme” for the Democrats, in local, statewide, and national voting, is Nashville/Davidson County.

That and the fact that Nashville is the state capital account for the predominance of the Middle Tennessee area in party fund-raising and in the incidence of Democratic nominees for statewide offices. Case in point for the former was the fact that 9th District congressman — and, not incidentally, former state senator — Steve Cohen had some of his major fund-raising events this year in Nashville. Case in point for the latter is the fact that two of the three major Democratic primary candidates for the U.S. Senate this year — Bob Tuke and Kenneth Eaton — hail from Nashville (the third, Mike Padgett, is from Knoxville).

What is unusual about the Senate primary that ends this week is that Tuke, regarded by most observers (and by his own polls) as the leader in that race, chose to make Shelby County the focus of his primary efforts — to the point of scheduling his election-night celebration for the Cadre Building in downtown Memphis. “We think this is where the decision will lie,” said an aide to the former Democratic Party chairman on an all-day swing through Shelby County on Saturday.

The thrust of his remark was that what is true for this week’s primary will hold true again for the November general election, when the Democratic Senate nominee will be up against it in a contest with the formidable Republican incumbent, Lamar Alexander.

Interestingly enough, Shelby County has figured large in another well-watched race — the Republican primary for Congress in the 7th District, a jurisdiction that snakes from Memphis’ eastern suburbs all the way into the western suburbs of Nashville.

Still regarded as a long shot, challenger Tom Leatherwood entered the last week of the primary hoping that home-county Shelby, where his yard signs have been plentiful of late, would give him a chance of overtaking the heavily favored incumbent, Marsha Blackburn of Williamson County.

• As Election Day approached, the voting patterns of Shelby County, as evinced during the two-week early-voting period, were subject to a variety of interpretations.

Bill Giannini, the Republican candidate for assessor against Democrat Cheyenne Johnson, saw the early stats as ominous, e-mailing a “Campaign Update” to his supporters that warned “Democrat turnout is at record levels in some Memphis precincts” and urged remedial action via a 72-hour get-out-the-vote operation.

The overall statistics on which Giannini based his conclusions went this way: Of the slightly more than 22,000 total ballots cast during early voting, 14,277 were by persons classifying themselves as black, 4,019 by self-identified whites, and 3,900 by persons choosing the description “other.” It is the hard-to-define demographics of that last category that could tell the tale in several close races.

A fair number of the “other” voters are presumed to be Asians and Hispanics, but many, too, are local residents who simply bridle at the idea of racial classification and choose not to identify themselves by race. Depending on how the “other” category breaks down, it could alter — minutely or substantially — the results that can be extrapolated from the ratio of self-identified black and white voters.

Clearly, Giannini is correct in that early voting, with its heavy concentration of African-American voters, favored Democratic candidates in head-on contests with Republicans. The effect of the ratio on other races is more uncertain, especially in regard to the 9th District contest between Cohen and primary opponent Nikki Tinker.

Democrat Cohen, it should be noted, has traditionally drawn Republican crossover votes, despite having a voting profile that is distinctly liberal, and several of his late ads and other pitches to voters have been thinly veiled appeals to GOP voters to come his way once again. In that sense, he and Leatherwood are involved in something of a competition.