Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy – Memphis Flyer

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

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

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

Jackson Baker

Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Germantown Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy before the School Board”

Most unusually for a school board meeting — of whatever jurisdiction — the main drama was not delayed by curricular or procedural minutiae at a jam-packed business session Monday night. Germantown, whose officials and citizens showed up en masse at the Coe administration building on Avery, saw the seven-member Shelby County Schools board turn down its plea for retaining the three schools siphoned from it in superintendent Dorsey Hopson’s new school plan, or at least for more time to discuss it.

Referring to debate on the matter as “a conversation just begun,” Mayor Sharon Goldsworthy, said, “We respectfully ask, even urge, that you delay a definitive decision about the schools within the city of Germantown.” She thereby led a parade of several fellow townsfolk in the board’s opening public period, which also featured spokespersons for other causes, including the rescue of South Side High School from the state’s ASD system, over which the board had no control, and for a K-through-8 expansion at Barrett’s Chapel, over which it did.

The Barrett’s Chapel folks would get their way, those from South Side couldn’t, and those from Germantown didn’t, despite some eloquent testifiers, including the young son of Tim Coulter, who followed his father with the affectingly simple line, “Please don’t take my school” (an echo of the South Siders’ own plea, “Please don’t take our school away”).

40-year leases for each municipality

After the public period was over, there were reports — from board chairman Kevin Woods, from the chairs of various committees, and finally the crucial one, the superintendent’s report, delivered in Hopson’s flat and measured phrasing.

After a typically understated reference to the “extraordinary level of angst” that had afflicted all sectors of the county during the school-merger controversy, followed by a brief statement of the good news for the Barrett’s Chapel contingent, Hopson detailed, city by city, his plan for the six incorporated suburbs that plan to have their own municipal school systems in August 2014.

Beginning with Arlington and proceeding through Bartlett, Lakeland, Millington, Germantown, and Collierville, Hopson read out his formula — a 40-year lease on terms to be negotiated for county school buildings currently within the cities’ municipal limits, and with each city responsible for both defaults and damages.

In only two cases was the number of leasable properties less than the number within those limits. As had been revealed in Hopkins’ bombshell announcement last week, Shelby County Schools intends to maintain responsibility for Lucy Elementary School in a community newly annexed by Millington and for three namesake institutions in Germantown — Germantown High School, Germantown Middle School, and Germantown Elementary School.

As Hopson and other SCS spokespersons explained last week, the choice of institutions to be retained was dictated by the system’s decision — for financial and various logistical reasons — to provide public education for the unincorporated areas of Shelby County and for the school-age populations in those areas. The four institutions chosen all contained majorities of pupils living in the unincorporated areas. (In an interview, though, Goldsworthy would contest that fact for Germantown Elementary.)

“In a nutshell,” said Hopson, “I have authorized myself and Ms. [Valerie] Speakman [the board attorney]” as negotiators with the suburbs.

“In the north…people like this deal….”

First board member to address the Hopson resolution was David Pickler, representative of Germantown and Collierville. Pickler expressed himself as “deeply troubled” by a plan that had not been submitted to an “open, fair, and public conversation” but had been engineered with “a very specific guiding of what the outcome had to be.”

Pickler then made a formal motion for the board to delay voting on the plan, pending “a more thought-out public process.”

Board chairman Woods asked if there was a second, and there was none — a fact causing several of the Germantown advocates in the audience, who had applauded Pickler lustily, to gasp or cry out in disbelief.

The reason would be made obvious when, after a ritual endorsement of “a very thoughtful resolution” by Memphis board member Teresa Jones, Bartlett member David Reaves, in a regretful but firm manner, lowered the boom. “In the north…most of the people like this deal,” he said. “I sympathize, but I represent the north.”

In a concession to Germantown sensiibilties, Reaves did move to divide the board’s voting on the plan six ways, city by city. That motion failed 5-2, with only Reaves and Pickler voting for it.

Before the board’s vote on the Hopson resolution, former board chairman Billy Orgel, who had been honored earlier for his service during the board’s 23-member transitional phase, said he thought the Hopson plan would hasten a mutually agreeable resolution of the whole merger controversy. (Unmentioned Monday night was the fact of the ongoing County Commission litigation against the municipalities’ school plans, still unsettled.)

Optional status for Germantown schools

Chairman Kevin Woods then posed a series of rhetorical questions to Hopson and attorney Speakman, addressing potentially contentious parts of the plan. That gave the superintendent the opportunity to note that the district would treat all three Germantown institutions as optional schools and that the staff and teachers at each would likely remain in place. For her part, Speakman affirmed that it was by no means unprecedented for schools within municipalities to function as parts of extraneous systems.

Pickler won one tenuous concession from Hopson — the superintendent’s somewhat tepid acknowledgement that theoretically the board, during negotiation, could consider revising the question of Germantown’s schools. The board then voted on Hopson’s plan, endorsing it 5-1-1, with Pickler the only no vote and Reaves politely abstaining.

In a colloquy with reporters later on, Goldsworthy talked of convening her lawyers and trying again to get public discussions on modification of the Hopson plan. She had no ready answer when asked if there was any legal alternative to acceptance of the board’s will. Asked if her city could run a viable school system minus the three affected schools and the state funding destined for students in the adjoining unincorporated area, she gamely suggested that, come what may, Germantown would succeed with its system.

Asked if there was any reason other than logistical for her city’s bearing the brunt of sacrifice in the Hopson plan, Goldsworthy only smiled cryptically. When her interviewer suggested he couldn’t interpret a smile, she answered, “Oh yes, you can.”