Tag: Memphis/Shelby County Schools

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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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Politics Politics Feature

Mopping-Up Time?

As Thanksgiving week began, events seemed to be moving quickly toward a final resolution of the Shelby County school situation.

Three years after the surrender of the Memphis City Schools charter and the resultant temporary consolidation of city and county schools, Shelby County Schools superintendent Dorsey Hopson’s template for allowing independent districts in six suburban municipalities has been approved by his board and seems to have found general favor.

The suburbs — all except Germantown, where hope may still linger for the reclamation of three flagship schools that Hopson intends to hold on to (see Viewpoint, p. 15) — are scrambling to sign on to a deal that involves the de facto sale to them of SCS-owned school buildings, though the legal terms are carefully structured to avoid being a sale per se.

On Friday, as they awaited a meeting of the Shelby County Commission that was specially called to liquidate the commission’s long-standing lawsuit against Lakeland and Arlington, the first two municipalities to settle, reporters debated how long the meeting, expected to be the epitome of pro forma, would last.

“Ten minutes,” said one. “Five minutes,” countered another. And a bystander nodded vigorously in agreement, whether with the first newsman or the second, it was hard to say.

All three would shortly learn otherwise. Germantown is evidently not the only site of remaining discontent.

First came Susanne Jackson, an inveterate activist from the Memphis Education Association orbit and, as she would remind her commission audience, from much further back than that to 1970s and the time of Plan Z desegregation. “Though I know the train has long left the station,” she said, she had concerns “about the settlement you’re about to make.”

These ranged from class-size changes in the new educational order to “troubling equity issues” of various kinds. In particular, she worried about the 10-cents-on-the-dollar price assessed on the transfer of school properties. She concluded by saying, “I want you to think long and hard about your decision.”

Jackson was followed by former Memphis City Schools board member Martavius Jones, a prime mover in the December 2010 surrender of the MCS charter that led to the very city-county school merger which is just now being sifted out in a settlement. That settlement will leave a truncated “unified” district with jurisdiction over the old MCS system, the county’s unincorporated areas, and a loose network of new municipal districts in the county’s six incorporated suburbs.

Jones, who served on the 23-member amalgamated city/county provisional board that expired in July, has made no secret of his hopes to be added on to the current SCS board, if and when it expands from seven members. And he came to the meeting with a full head of steam, complaining that the six suburban municipalities comprise only 18.5 percent of Shelby County’s population but, under the terms of the proposed settlement, would have sole access to school buildings whose construction costs were paid by “99 percent of the county.”

He said that the county commission, “the only legislative body that represents all of Shelby County,” was about to sanction a “separatist and secessionist” system in the outer county and to approve “the most ill-advised real estate proposition since the Louisiana Purchase.”

Former Commission chair Mike Ritz, who, by leave of current chair James Harvey, has continued as the body’s point man on litigation matters, contradicted Jones’ assertions, contending that property taxes paid by citizens were “unrelated to population,” that “people in the suburbs” paid an “inordinate” share of the tax burden and, under the agreement, would continue to make “considerable contributions” to the “whole system,” i.e., the unified district as well as those in the suburbs.

That was by no means the end of controversy, however, even after the commission parsed a number of technical matters with county attorney Kelly Rayne and special commission attorney Lori Patterson and concurred to drop action against Lakeland. When they turned their attention to Arlington, Commissioner Henri Brooks had a whole new set of grievances to vent.

Brooks had abstained on the Lakeland vote, and now she protested one of the linchpins of the proposed agreement, the premise, as repeated in detail by the two attorneys, that the school buildings being deeded over to Arlington and Lakeland were not being sold, that, instead, the payments being asked of the municipalities were to offset pensions and OPEBs (Other Post-Employment Benefits) and the debt arising from them.

“The constituents I represent are very uncomfortable with that,” Brooks said, arguing that “public perceptions” would see it all as a sale. And she had more to say.

“What part of the 14th Amendment is negotiable? What about the children? What are they getting out of this? Do we have a way to protect children who may be resegregated after this settlement? What if there is resegregation? If we drop the claims, that’s it?”

This, indeed, was a potential sore spot, since what the commission was voting on was not acceptance of a settlement — the SCS board and the suburbs were attending to that — but dissolving the litigation against the suburbs. In practice, that had come down to the single issue of whether the new municipal school systems in the outer county would be unconstitutionally fostering resegregation.

Brooks made a point of noting that “people of color have moved to the unincorporated areas.” She worried that dropping the resegregation claim would leave the children of such pioneers helpless. And Brooks, who was a child in the pre-civil-rights era and has several times recited to her colleagues a litany of indignities she experienced, averred, “I don’t want the children of today to relive my experiences.”

In an attempt to get beyond this concern, Commissioner Heidi Shafer, whose district straddles city and county, asked Patterson if the commission couldn’t just refile a legal action if blatant resegregation developed. Patterson answered that it could.

But Brooks was not put off. She wondered out loud if “a citizen could bring an action against this commission for the settlement” and if an advisory to that effect couldn’t be built into the agreement.

Rayne quickly responded: “I would not advise you to approve anything in the agreement opening you up to a lawsuit.”

Chairman Harvey translated that thought into stark political terms: “I think the attorney is saying that trying to put that idea in the community’s head opens us up to a can of worms.”

In the end, Brooks’ suggestion got no support, and the commissioner, a candidate for Juvenile Court clerk who sees herself as a tribune for African Americans at large, ended by saying, “My intent is to get an understanding so that I may cast an informed vote for the people.”

Shafer, one of five commission Republicans who have consistently supported the suburban municipalities in their efforts for independent school districts, tried to sum up the morning’s discussion: “I am supporting this. Everybody’s probably equally mad,” she said, and that was a good sign. “It’s time for us to move forward. Teachers and students have been in a state of terrible uncertainty for three years.”

It then fell to her GOP colleague, Terry Roland of Millington, who over the last three years has surely raised his share of hell about school-merger matters, to try to stuff the genie back into the bottle: “It is my pleasure to see closure. I call the question.”

The vote this time was 9 to 1, Brooks casting the only no.

The way seems clear now to a formal resolution of the school controversy, at least for the conclusion of agreements this week with Millington, Bartlett, and Collierville, all of which seemed amenable. Conciliatory feelers were even coming from Germantown.

But, as last Friday’s special commission meeting made obvious, dissatisfaction of various kinds is likely to endure. And it may well resurface in some form when the commission meets again, for what it hopes is a final mopping-up session, on Monday, December 2nd.

And presiding federal judge Hardy Mays — remember him? He still has to sign off on the deal and, most assuredly, wants to be able to. As soon as the litigation is formally dropped, he’ll have no reason not to.

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Politics Politics Feature

Mike Ritz: It Ain’t Over Yet

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

Shelby County Commission chairman Mike Ritz, the man who has been at the center of the school-merger crisis for the last two years and has been the driving force behind ongoing litigation, assayed the situation in the wake of Monday’s passage of municipal-schools legislation in Nashville and saw some complications remaining.

Jackson Baker

Mike Ritz

At some point, a few of the six suburban municipalities may find the independent school districts they establish vulnerable to legal challenge, Ritz said. The chairman, a resident of Germantown himself, pinpointed Germantown as most likely to encounter problems because of the large number of non-resident students served by the eight schools now operating within the city.

“These students may not be educated by the city for long because they won’t be contributing to the taxes paid by Germantown residents to maintain the schools, and the city’s taxpayers may get their board to react to that,” said Ritz, who noted that a fair number of the outliers would be minority students, and any change in their status would put the district in jeopardy.

The next phase of the commission’s litigation against municipal schools is an equal-opportunity challenge on resegregation grounds, and presiding U.S. district judge Hardy Mays is maintaining the option to hold trial on the point, though Ritz acknowledged that any such process might not occur until after the new municipal districts are established, probably in August 2014.

Another matter noted by Ritz was that of how and at what cost new municipal districts might acquire existing school buildings. This is a question to be negotiated between the municipalities and the Unified School Board, Ritz said. “That makes it all the more urgent that we go ahead and expand the board to 13 members, a number more representative of the entire community.”

Ritz said that enough issues remained unresolved to justify a resumption of the negotiations between the commission and the municipalities that were conducted briefly but suspended at year’s end. “I think they [the municipalities] will see it in their interest to come back to the table,” he said.

• The bill enabling municipal schools in Shelby County (SB 1353/HB 1288) was a retooling of a 2012 version that had been ruled unconstitutional by Mays because its application was limited to Shelby County.

The new version applies statewide and, for whatever reason, did not encounter the controversy that befell an early draft of the 2012 bill that was scaled back to meet objections from legislators outside Shelby County.

With little more than perfunctory debate, this year’s bill passed both chambers of the Republican-dominated Tennessee General Assembly with comfortable margins Monday, thereby allowing the de facto secession from Shelby County’s soon-to-be “unified” school district that six suburban municipalities in the county have been seeking for at least two years.

Mayors and other representatives of those suburbs — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington, and Millington — were on hand for the occasion and were introduced in the state House of Representatives by suburban GOP members before Monday’s vote in that chamber. The House vote was 70-24 in favor. The Senate followed with a 24-5 tally for the bill.

There was some opposition. In the House, Representative Bill Dunn (R-Knoxville) rose to express forebodings about the measure and declared his opposition to it, as he had to last year’s original model. Dunn worried that, since this year’s bill, unlike the final product last year, was cast so as to apply statewide, not just to Shelby County, “we’re going to see some problems down the road.”

The Knoxville legislator pointed out that he had ultimately supported the Shelby County-only version of last year’s bill, but “unfortunately, a judge shut it down.” He reminded his colleagues that he had “asked that the current bill be rolled” until a version with dependable safeguards for school districts statewide could be perfected, but,” unfortunately it was not rolled.” Consequently, “I will be voting no tonight. I hope I’m wrong, but I don’t think I’m gonna be.”

Objections came also from representatives from the city of Memphis, who, unlike their suburban Shelby County colleagues, were opposed to the bill. Representatives G.A. Hardaway, Antonio Parkinson, and Johnnie Turner all took shots at the measure, articulating their concerns about the effect of the bill on the county’s unified school district, still in the process of formation, and extracting assurances from primary House sponsor Curry Todd (R-Collierville) that the bill had no immediate impact upon the future disposition of school buildings currently owned by Shelby County.

Both Hardaway and Parkinson gave voice to a rumor that has circulated widely of late, namely, that an unspoken arrangement exists between the bill’s sponsors — Todd and Senate majority leader Mark Norris being the principal ones — and Republican colleagues in districts elsewhere to the effect that a one-year window would be held open for Shelby County and would be closed for everybody else by follow-up legislation next year.

Todd, who had begun his remarks by expressing thanks for the “61 signatures” of House co-sponsors he had received, blithely gave assurances that no such revocation next year was planned and that if it was proposed, “I would vote against it.”

Representative Craig Fitzhugh (D-Ripley), leader of the 27 House Democrats, made one last stand against the measure. “I hadn’t planned to speak on this bill,” Fitzhugh said. “I thought I didn’t have a dog in the hunt. … But, as so goes Memphis, so goes my little town and my district.” And he expressed concern about the “long-term effect” of the bill upon Memphis.

In the Senate, Democratic leader Jim Kyle (D-Memphis) warned his Senate colleagues of potential negative effects of the bill on other counties and other districts.  

“A special school district could withdraw and become a municipal district,” he said. “This is a mistake — a mistake you’ll see in your community one day.” And senators would ask themselves, said Kyle, “‘Why did I get involved in a boundary dispute in Shelby County?’ … bringing to your front door what essentially is a local dispute.”

The bill now requires only the signature of Governor Bill Haslam and perhaps an ultimate vetting by Mays.

• Another long-running issue dealt with as the General Assembly neared the end of the 2013 session was legislation (SB 0132) proposed by state senator Stacey Campfield (R-Knoxville) that would have required the state department of human services to reduce state aid to families of failing school children.

Dubbed “Starve-the-Children,” the bill would be shunted off to “summer study” by the state Senate, earning a fate that had previously befallen Campfield’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill that would have outlawed discussions of homosexuality in the state’s elementary schools. That bill, after being relegated to summer study in 2011, finally expired in a House committee this year.

The first hint of serious trouble for Campfield on SB 0132 came during floor debate, when GOP majority leader Norris pronounced himself “queasy” about the bill, which would reduce state aid to dependent families whose children were experiencing grade trouble. The bill had already engendered a mid-week statement of opposition from Haslam and had been actively opposed by any number of agencies and institutions concerned with student welfare.

Norris told Campfield, “You’re fooling yourself,” regarding the Knoxville senator’s claim that only parents and not children would be penalized by the withholding from the affected family an average of $20 a month in state support payments. The majority leader also referred to the bill as “the sort of legislation that gets challenged in a court of law as vague and ambiguous, arbitrary and capricious.”

Concurring with a statement by state senator Lowe Finney (D-Jackson) that the bill would “make the child responsible for the parents’ actions,” Senator Todd Gardenhire (R-Chattanooga) said, “You can’t legislate parental responsibility. I don’t care what you do.” He foresaw “unintended consequences” for the student. “The parent will beat the dog doo out of him for taking that $20 away from them, that’s what’s going to happen.”

In the end, with Lieutenant Governor Ron Ramsey (R-Blountville), the Senate speaker, explicitly encouraging him to do so, Campfield offered to have the bill referred again to the Senate health committee and to have it relegated to the aforesaid summer-study status, which he hoped would allow it to be ultimately retooled in coordination with K-12 education subcommittees of the Senate and House.

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Editorial Opinion

Call Nashville

CREDIT: Danziger

Here they go again. This is the week scheduled for the Tennessee General Assembly’s consideration of several school bills relating to Memphis and Shelby County. Once again, we will see if the elected representatives of constituencies far away from the concerns of Shelby Countians will make another attempt to dictate our educational future. Galvanized into action by Senate majority leader Mark Morris (R-Collierville) and other Shelby County suburban legislators, the Assembly’s GOP majority has loyally complied each of the last two years — in 2011 passing Norris-Todd, the kicker of which was to enable suburban school districts to begin forming in August of this year, and following up with a pair of bills in 2012 designed to expedite that process.

Federal judge Hardy Mays struck down last year’s key bill, inasmuch as it, like the others, opened up the municipal-school-district process for Shelby County only and not statewide (those supportive Republican legislators from elsewhere may have been loyal, but they didn’t stop being self-interested — or mindful of their own constituents’ views). Given that the other two bills would seem to be vulnerable to the same judicial reasoning, whatever gets passed this year would seemingly need to apply everywhere. They are written that way, more or less, and it remains to be seen whether they’ll be a hard sell with the 2013 version of the General Assembly.

Whether or not, it’s time once again for Memphis to endure the legislative equivalent of a grade school time-out, to be told what it needs to do — or permit to be done — to satisfy the steely masterminds of the central state government in Nashville. It’s gotten to the point that when the Shelby County Commission took up the issue of expanding the Unified School Board from 7 to 13, suburban Republican commissioner Terry Roland, focusing on the unresolved issue of municipal school districts, opined that he would prefer to bypass any action by the commission and “call Nashville” to get something done to his liking.

Other members of the commission pointed out the obvious: that, where the legitimacy of school-related bills is concerned, it’s Hardy Mays who’ll be the judge of all that, not Mark Norris or Ron Ramsey, the increasingly imperial (but undeniably shrewd) head of the Senate, or any other legislator from wheresoever. Doing a reduction on that, geographically speaking, the judgment will come from Memphis, not Nashville.

And it’s not just schools where the urge exists to dictate in Nashville (and to slavishly follow in the Memphis suburbs). The General Assembly has in recent years passed bill after bill taking away the power of local jurisdictions to regulate their own affairs, and, alas, Governor Bill Haslam has shrugged and signed them into law (demurring so far only in the case of a 2012 bill curtailing the rights of Vanderbilt, in his own backyard).

Most recently, the notorious Glen Casada, a GOP House member from suburban Nashville, has begun to push through a bill restricting the right of localities to pass legislation affecting wage issues — like wage-theft ordinances that have been, or were about to be, considered by the Memphis City Council and Shelby County Commission.

Call Nashville indeed, and tell the folks up there to stop treading on us.

Categories
Opinion Viewpoint

Obstructing From Within

The conversations between county commissioners and school board commissioners at the Shelby County Commission’s budget retreat a couple weeks ago, Judge Hardy Mays’ comments about his frustration over school board decision-making processes, and my recent conversations with a suburban mayor and a school board commissioner have confirmed in my mind that it will be difficult for the school board to open the 2013-14 school year with the best chance for success. The need for a special master is quite apparent.

(Editor’s note: This week federal judge Hardy Mays appointed former City of Memphis CAO Rick Masson special master for city/county school merger.)

Mike Ritz

The Unified School Board (USB) has 23 members until August 31st. Six of those members (Snowden Carruthers, Mike Wissman, Joe Clayton, Ernest Chism, David Reaves, and David Pickler) appear to be supporting the suburban mayors who criticize the USB and its goals. It plays well for the suburban mayors’ municipal, special, and charter school legislation in Nashville for the USB to publicly struggle. Wissman, as the elected head of Arlington, is, in fact, one of those mayors.

Three USB members (Jeff Warren, Freda Williams, and Kenneth Whalum) did not support the December 2010 vote to give up the Memphis City Schools charter. Sara Lewis, who joined the board after that vote, was also known to be opposed. Those four seem to support postponing the merger, in the hopes that municipal and/or charter schools will appear in some or all of the suburbs and the unified system will just be a slightly larger MCS system, allowing them to continue as if MCS still exists.

The two leaders of MCS who voted to give up the charter (Martavius Jones and Tomeka Hart) recently led the efforts on the board to postpone the merger for a year. Their rationale may be similar to the other four MCS resisters, and they may be having some seller’s remorse over leading an effort opposed by so much suburban political clout in Nashville.

These 12 board members represent a majority of the current 23-member board. They don’t vote on every matter together. However, their actions or inactions allowed MCS superintendent Kriner Cash, who publicly opposed the Transition Planning Commission (TPC) recommendations, to stay in place long after the board voted not to make him the permanent superintendent. Many of these 12 members, if not all, recently voted for a budget with a $145 million shortfall. These actions and many more similar actions or inactions add fuel to the fire of suburban mayors and other critics of a unified system.

As chairman of the county commission, I have been working with Superintendent John Aitken, interim superintendent Dorsey Hopson, and school board chairman Billy Orgel to share with them the county’s fiscal situation and try to position their budget needs for their best chance of receiving county funding over and above the $362 million a year we have to continue.

With their budget chairman, Chris Caldwell, working with them, they proposed a budget close to the recommended $60 million shortfall recommended by the TPC. Recent calculations indicate that there may be votes on the county commission for no more than about $5 million in new funding for the school budget that begins July 1st. Any more than that figure would require raising the tax rate by more than 10 percent and would need a nine-vote super majority — impossible on this divided commission.

The actions of the Unified School Board over the next 90 days will decide the success of its first year, whether it has support of the community, and whether that community support can help secure more than $5 million in new funds for the school system in 2014. I hope a combination of media attention, public pressure, and the fact of a special master can prompt the board to make some critical decisions.

The suburban mayors’ response to this financial dilemma confuses many county commissioners. No matter whether the unified school system stays in place for many years or municipal school systems or charter school systems appear in every suburb, the mayors should support the county commission in providing more school funding.

The mayors surely know they will need much more fiscal support for their local schools than a half-cent sales tax can provide. And funding from the county commission on a per-student basis would relieve them of making property tax increases. Most of the current complaints of school board budget decisions are coming from suburban parents who seem to get the fiscal picture, even if their mayors do not.

Does the suburban mayors’ disgust with the unified school system trump their fiscal concerns? I believe their support of the unified system this year could greatly change the voting dynamics on the school board and the potential for commission vote for a greater than 10-percent property tax increase.

Mike Ritz is chairman of the Shelby County Commission.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

No More Proscrastination

CREDIT: Danziger

Across the page from this editorial in the hard copy and via this link online is this week’s Viewpoint, written by Mike Ritz, chairman of the Shelby County Commission and an activist sort who is clearly not content to preside over meetings or to be a neutral arbiter over disagreements.

Even before his ascension to the chairmanship, Ritz was anything but bashful in advancing his several agendas — most of which had to do with issues of fiscal solvency, a fact which made him a typical Republican of a certain sort and, more often than not, cast him as a member of a voting minority (not infrequently, in fact, as a minority of one).

For the last two years, however, the current chairman has been out of kilter with the other five GOP members of the commission on what is arguably the most significant issue confronted by the county’s legislative body, and certainly the most divisive and volatile one. This is the matter of city/county school merger, in which Ritz, not only a Republican but a resident of Germantown, has consistently advocated and orchestrated a coalition of eight members (the other seven are Democrats and urban dwellers) behind the goal of a unified public-school system.

Whatever his motives, they cannot be attributed to regional or political parochialism. It would appear that they might indeed owe something to the aforesaid idea of fiscal solvency and to a belief in unity for its own sake. Ritz was pursuing a route to single-source funding of the county’s schools long before the merger issue came up via the December 2010 decision by a majority of the Memphis City Schools board to surrender the MCS charter, thereby forcing a merger with Shelby County Schools.

To be candid, it is possible that the commission chairman’s insistence on keeping school merger on track may be driven somewhat by the fact that the commission is fiscally, politically, and to some limited degree legally the de facto wielder of power in such a process. Indeed, much of what Ritz has put on his plate, on school issues or whatever, has served to remind observers that state law puts county government at the top of the political pyramid.

In any case, the argument that Ritz puts forward in this week’s Viewpoint is a challenge to the bona fides of the provisional school board, which all too often does indeed, as he suggests, seem to be pulling against its ostensible goal of forming a workable and unified educational system. It is worth pointing out that Ritz is not alone in posing such a challenge. We see a counterpart in presiding federal judge Hardy Mays’ recent actions, including his move toward appointing a special master to oversee unity and his no-nonsense declaration to all parties that, like it or not, a unified system will come into being for the 2013-14 school year.

In the course of time — and that could be as short as a single year — constructive alternatives could emerge to what the Shelby County suburbs’ legislative champion, state senator Mark Norris, derisively calls “mere merger,” maybe along lines of autonomy already suggested by the Transition Planning Commission.

But it’s surely time for an end to the delaying game, as Ritz suggests and Mays demands.

Categories
Politics Politics Feature

Roads Not Taken

In the same way that, proverbially, all roads once ran to Rome, all breaking-news issues seem these days to run to the intractably divisive matter of school consolidation.

Projected budget shortfalls for the forthcoming Unified School District have dominated recent headlines in their own right. They also link to all the lingering discontent of the suburbs regarding the matter — both locally and in Nashville, where suburbanites and their legislative allies are expected to make another run at bills enabling municipal school districts.

The shortfalls, estimates of which now range from $80 million to upwards of $150 million, were the occasion for a press conference Monday in the lobby of the Vasco Smith county building, at which spokespersons for the independence movement urged an end to the Shelby County Commission’s ongoing lawsuit against potential MSDs.

Pinning their case on the expected shortfall, they suggested that cuts in school personnel and programs could be avoided by aborting the forthcoming city/county school merger.

In a ruling last year, U.S. district judge Hardy Mays declared unconstitutional 2012 legislation in the General Assembly that would have enabled the fast-track establishment of separate suburban school districts. Still to be adjudicated is the final clause of the 2011 Norris-Todd Act, which would permit efforts to create such districts after August of this year.

As principal spokesman Ken Hoover argued it at the press conference, the proposed MSDs would be financed by taxes already voted by residents of the suburbs, whereas the soon-to-be Unified District faces insuperable obstacles in paying for its services, thereby shortchanging parents in the suburbs as well as those in the former Memphis City Schools.

Later, at the end of the county commission’s regular meeting and after a suburban resident or two had addressed the county legislative body on the subject, Hoover came to the dock and presented a distilled version of what he had already spoken to at the press conference.

Not without a full dose of “I-told-you-so” and a taste or two of irony, he focused on the loss, implicit in the proposed Unified School District budget, of 443 positions to the suburban schools — and, even as amended in a revised budget due Tuesday, of no less than 377.

His remarks to the commission were followed by a mini-philippic from Commissioner Terry Roland, who placed the blame for the ongoing litigation — and, by implication, for the seemingly insoluble budget crunch of the Unified System — on the county commission itself, for presuming to take charge of the merger process and establish a structure for it.

Commissioner Wyatt Bunker, a onetime member of the old Shelby County Schools board, continued along lines set by his two predecessors, but he concluded with his announcement of “a resolution directing … our attorney, Leo Bearman, to take all measures necessary to withdraw the county commission’s lawsuit opposing the creation of municipal schools.”

To be voted on at Monday’s meeting required a suspension of the rules, which predictably failed, given the commission’s 8-5 balance of power favoring merger proponents. But Bunker will have a chance to add his resolution to the next commission agenda, two weeks hence. And it will no doubt be debated in committee on Wednesday, February 20th.

Meanwhile, Roland, who apparently made a pilgrimage to Nashville last week, and other suburban advocates insist that, despite the reluctance of last year’s General Assembly to pass legislation allowing new municipal school districts statewide, this year’s legislature will be a different story.

All that is certain is that there will be a Unified School District in 2013-14 that includes the whole of Shelby County. How it gets paid for and what comes after that are questions not yet answered.

• Earlier at the commission meeting, there had been a wrangle over a proposed five-year moratorium on county residence requirements for former Memphis City Schools personnel coming into the county’s jurisdiction in the Unified District.

An amendment by Chairman Mike Ritz exempting (or “grandfathering in”) employees of MCS who started in 1986 or before was proposed and passed, but no general exemption was enacted despite vigorous arguments by commissioners James Harvey, Steve Mulroy, and others.

The case for a general exemption was countered by several commissioners, notably Heidi Shafer and Walter Bailey, who argued that public employment within Shelby County imposed civic obligations that included taxpaying residence.  

That argument seemed to carry the day. The umbrella exemption failed 6-6.

Categories
Cover Feature News

Memphis Schools: A Year in Limbo?

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

After rendering his long-awaited and fateful judgment last week declaring unconstitutional 2012 legislation allowing the immediate start-up of new municipal school districts in Shelby County, U.S. district judge Hardy Mays is off on a vacation in the Caribbean, and in his absence, new suspense is building about the fate of Section 3 of Public Chapter 1 of the 2011 Tennessee General Assembly — aka Norris-Todd.

Mays has already bestowed his imprimatur on most of Norris-Todd, which established the framework for city/county school merger, but he has yet to rule on Section 3, which would enable the ultimate creation of the independent municipal districts.

Meanwhile, Shelby County’s school situation is in limbo, with only one apparent certainty — that, as of the school year beginning August 2013, there will be, for at least that year, a Unified School District in Shelby County comprising the former public schools of what had been Memphis City Schools and the former version of Shelby County Schools, which was limited to institutions outside the city limits of Memphis.

So far, all the parties involved in the ongoing controversy — which was triggered originally by the MCS board’s vote to surrender its charter in December 2010 — are biding their time, with no one certain as to what comes next.

In the course of a brief visit to Memphis last week, Governor Bill Haslam, who had signed all the relevant merger-related legislation to date, urged caution: “I want to be encouraging everybody: Let’s leave the courtroom behind, and let’s go sit down and have conversations that we need to prepare.” Not legislation. Not new legal briefs. Conversations.

Haslam’s lead was rapidly followed up by Jim Kyle, the Memphis Democrat who heads the seriously shrunken Democratic caucus in the state Senate and was narrowly reelected to that post by his colleagues last week.

In a press release Monday from his Senate office in Nashville, Kyle announced that he had asked Tennessee commissioner of education Kevin Huffman “to act as an independent, honest broker in the organizational restructure of Shelby County Schools” and claimed that he had support in that approach from his Republican opposite number, state senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville), the Senate’s majority leader and the principal author of both Norris-Todd and the follow-up legislation of 2012.

“We have seen what happens when we divide on ideology; it is unproductive. The political dynamics are what brought us to this point and will drive us back if we do not choose to act differently,” Kyle said in the press release, excerpting a portion of his letter to Huffman.

Both Norris himself and state representative Curry Todd (R-Collierville), his co-sponsor on the merger-related bills, were absent from a meeting of the Shelby County legislative delegation with local officials at the University of Memphis Monday, but Norris, while suggesting that a new round of legislation might be forthcoming in the legislative session of 2013, was so far keeping his own counsel about the nature of it.

Keith McDonald, mayor of Bartlett and for the last two years the most active spokesperson for the municipal-school concept, was at the U of M meeting and basically recapped for reporters his sentiments of last week in the wake of Mays’ ruling.

“We’re wounded, but we’re not dead,” McDonald had said then. He conceded that the ruling made municipal systems impossible for the 2013-14 school year but held out hope that Norris-Todd might still be found viable, permitting the suburbs to make a new start on municipal districts after August 2013.

“There are all kinds of creative new ideas for public education, in both the state and the nation,” McDonald said, apropos the idea of seeking alternatives to the concept of municipal school districts. “As I’ve said for two years, we’re in this for as long as it takes.”

And David Pickler, the former chairman of the Shelby County Schools board, a current member of the Unified School Board representing Germantown and Collierville, and a proponent of municipal schools, said of Mays’ ruling last week in language anticipating Haslam’s later comments, “This is certainly a delay, but not necessarily a defeat. It’s even an opportunity for all parties to the issue to engage with each other in a boardroom, not a courtroom, possibly to create a new vision that respects everybody’s rights and the principle of self-determination.” 

Satisfaction was meanwhile expressed by members of the Shelby County Commission majority, chief among the plaintiffs and the architects of the Unified School District. “It looks like we got what we asked for,” said commission chairman Mike Ritz, who predicted that the suburbs would be hamstrung in getting new legislation passed. Ritz’s colleague Steve Mulroy said simply, “We won.”

If there is to be a “new vision” of the sort mentioned by Pickler, it will build upon the existing scaffolding of Sections 1 and 2 of Norris-Todd. There is a fair amount of irony in that fact.

Norris-Todd was rushed into passage at the very start of the 2011 legislative session by its suburban sponsors, ostensibly as a means of slowing down and organizing what was then a pell-mell rush toward the merger of Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools.

That aim was accomplished by the establishment of a merger date, August 2013, and by the bill’s creation of a 21-member Transition Planning Commission, which met for a year and made a series of recommendations on the merger, which were duly presented to an ad hoc 23-member Unified School District board.

But while most of Norris-Todd passed muster with Judge Mays in a preliminary ruling on school litigation in August 2011, Section 3 of the bill, the legislation’s trump card (and, advocates of school merger contend, its true raison d’être) is still in jeopardy.

What Section 3 does is lift, for Shelby County only, a long-standing state ban on new school districts, and it was seized upon as a way out of merger by six Shelby County suburbs — Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, Arlington, Lakeland, and Millington. The now defunct legislation of 2012, also by Norris and Todd, was meant to allow those municipalities to begin taking the first steps toward creating new districts so as to have them ready to go by the August 2013 merger date.

That add-on measure, Public Chapter 905, was in response to an opinion by state attorney general Robert Cooper, who had ruled that no such steps could be taken until the merger date itself. This meant that, for at least the school year 2013-14, the public schools of the former Shelby County Schools system would in fact co-exist under the same umbrella as those of Memphis City Schools, whose board had voted to surrender the MCS charter in December 2010 (an act later ratified by a Memphis City Council that was no doubt anxious to escape thereby a court-ordered $68 million annual “maintenance-of-effort” payment to MCS).

Both 905 and a less-sweeping companion measure by Norris-Todd, Public Chapter 970, served to get around Cooper’s ruling and to allow the six suburbs to hold referenda in August of this year for half-cent sales-tax increases and to elect school boards in November.

Those actions were duly taken but were nullified when Mays found the two 2012 acts unconstitutional on grounds that the measures, though enacted — with what Mays called “a wink and a nod” — as general legislation, had targeted Shelby County only.

Therefore, said the judge, they had improperly circumvented the requirements for private laws in Tennessee, which must either be submitted to a referendum of all affected voters or ratified by the locality’s chief legislative body — in this case, the Shelby County Commission, chief plaintiffs against the creation of municipal schools in complicated litigation which had begun in early 2011, ironically enough, with a suit by the former SCS to halt school merger.

The conundrum facing Norris and other suburban allies in the General Assembly going forward is that there is serious resistance in the General Assembly to any legislation that would open up the Pandora’s box of new special school districts beyond Shelby County. It was that fact that caused the 2012 legislation to be written in such a way as to doom its prospects with Mays, and it is that fact which renders Section 3 of Norris-Todd vulnerable as well.

In the language of Mays’ ruling last week: “Although general in form, Public Chapter 905 is local in effect. Because it does not include a provision for local approval, Chapter 905 is VOID under Article 11, Section 9 of the Tennessee Constitution. All actions taken under the authority of Chapter 905 are VOID. The Municipalities are enjoined from proceeding under Chapter 905 to establish municipal school districts.

“The Third-Party Plaintiffs are invited to submit additional arguments, both factual and legal, addressing only the constitutionality of Chapter 970 and Section 3 of Chapter 1 under Article 11, Sections 8 and 9 of the Tennessee Constitution. Those arguments should be submitted not later than December 11, 2012, and should not include further references to legislative history. The Third-Party Defendants may respond no later than December 27, 2012.”

So it is that, two years to the month since the MCS board surrendered its charter, the plaintiffs in the ongoing suit — the Shelby County Commission, the Memphis City Council, and the city of Memphis — will make their last pitch. The municipalities will make theirs some two weeks later, on the virtual eve of a new year.

And in the month that follows, assuming that Mays provides a timely judgment, Norris, Todd, and other legislative allies of the suburbs will plan their next moves. If Mays allows Section 3 to stand, there will doubtless be legislation addressing the manner in which existing school buildings can be made over to the suburban districts, and establishing the cost of such a transaction, if any.

If Mays says no to Section 3 of Norris-Todd, however, the game is over. The plaintiffs will have won, and there will be one common educational district for the public schools of Shelby County (absent those subsumed in the new state-ordained and operated Achievement School District for failing institutions). At that point, the suburbs will have to accept merger at long last or launch some other strategy, perhaps availing themselves of the state’s aggressive new policy in encouraging charter schools.

For the time being, though, everything remains in limbo. — Jackson Baker

The Confusion Over Closing Schools

Elvis was here 60 years ago, but these days Humes Middle School is starved for students. In fact, it has the lowest occupancy of any public school in Memphis — 17 percent — which put it on the Unified School Board’s agenda last week.

The board is considering closing six schools, although the Transition Planning Commission recommended closing 21 schools, which is less than half of the schools with enrollment below 65 percent of capacity. There are 212 schools in the Memphis City Schools system and 52 schools in the Shelby County system, plus 30 charter schools for a total enrollment of about 150,000 students. The Unified School Board and the administrative staff are trying to “right size” the system under the watchful eye of parents and teachers’ union leaders who want to minimize closings.

Humes and Gordon Elementary School, another low-enrollment school in North Memphis, illustrate the hard decisions and convoluted “school reform” picture that board members are facing.

Humes Middle School is less than a mile from the heart of downtown. It borders the Uptown neighborhood of new, brightly painted houses and duplexes that replaced a crime-ridden housing project. Three nonprofit agencies — Porter-Leath, the Salvation Army, and Bridges — are heavily invested in the neighborhood. The school facility itself is in good shape, due to the massive spending on Memphis schools in the past 20 years driven by the city-county school funding formula. When the county system built a school in the fast-growing suburbs, more than twice as much money had to be spent in the city of Memphis, even though it was losing population except for annexation. This means that, whatever deficiencies they might have, low-enrollment schools are generally not blighted buildings.

“Humes would be a huge loss,” said MCS superintendent Kriner Cash at last week’s board meeting.

The plan is to “repurpose” Humes as a music and performing arts school and move its students to the Gordon Elementary School building about a mile away. Gordon Elementary School is “co-located” with a charter school in the same building. And if this is not complicated enough, Gordon is going to become one of the state-run schools in the Achievement School District (ASD) for failing schools. The definition of a “failing” school depends on which rankings, grades, and test scores are used. In the eyes of various board members, Gordon is either failing, improving, or in good standing.

The fog of jargon and data makes it hard to tell if schools are actually being closed or just being renamed while students are moved around.

The Transition Planning Commission says closing 21 schools would save about $20 million, but Cash contends the savings would only be $9.6 million. And if there are only six closings, the savings, Cash said, would be $4 million.

Gordon Elementary was built in 1939 in a North Memphis neighborhood called Smokey City. Cash said the Achievement School District had its sights set on taking over Humes because of its historical significance as Elvis Presley’s alma mater and the school’s abysmally low utilization rate. But Cash negotiated for Memphis City Schools to “close” the school and reopen it as Memphis Academy of Musical Arts & Sciences. The resulting tradeoff required turning over the entirety of Gordon Elementary and the Gordon Academy of Arts and Sciences, run by Gestalt charter schools, to the ASD. Gordon Elementary currently covers pre-K through fifth grade, while Gordon Academy of Arts and Sciences handles sixth grade.

When and if Humes Middle School closes, its seventh- and eighth-graders will be sent to Gestalt’s Gordon Academy of Arts and Sciences, which will expand to accommodate sixth through eighth grade, and eventually, Cash hopes, to pre-K through eighth grade. Gordon Elementary students will be sent to nearby Carnes and Caldwell-Guthrie elementary schools, and the Memphis City Schools-run Gordon Elementary will be closed.

This idea did not please a group of Gordon Elementary supporters, including fifth-grader Lance Armstrong, who pleaded with the board members to spare his school.

“There’s an old saying, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it,'” said Armstrong. “We are the Gordon Rockets. Let us soar and we will make you proud.”

Keith Williams, president of the Memphis Education Association, said the school is vital to the community.

“It is a community of declining population, a community racked with poverty, but Gordon is a beacon of light in that community,” he said.

School board member Stephanie Gatewood moved that each school’s closure be voted on individually instead of as a package. The board agreed to move forward with the closure process for each of the six schools after a series of community meetings, culminating in a final vote or votes in March.

Board chairman Billy Orgel concluded the meeting with a warning about the inadequacy of the $5 million the unified system is projected to save if six schools are closed.

“It’s not assured that we’re going to close these schools,” he said. “Our decision won’t come until March after thorough investigation. But if you take the $5 million and you add it back to the $57 million [gap between expenditures and revenue], we’re going to be short. There’s no money out there for public education. It’s not political. It’s not pandering. It’s reality. There’s no money.” — Hannah Sayle

Odd Couples on Unified School Board Get Along

A couple of years ago, it might have seemed like the Dinner Party from Hell. Gather the members of the Memphis and Shelby County school boards, throw in some fresh faces, bust up the alliances, and put them in a room together for hours at a time for a year or so.

At the center of the table sit superintendents Kriner Cash and John Aitken, total strangers four years ago. Nearby, county schools champion David Pickler sits next to MCS charter surrender leader Martavius Jones. As much as anyone, these two set the tone for frank but civil discussions in a series of debates and joint public appearances in 2010-2011.

The unified school system may or may not work, but the Unified School Board — by design and circumstance — has the most interesting seating chart in town. It may not lead to a world-class unified school system, but it has probably done as much consciousness raising as any public undertaking in recent history.

Other seatmates include Memphis firebrand Dr. Kenneth Whalum Jr. and Germantown schools lion Ernest Chism; Dr. Snowden Carruthers of the old county board and Tomeka Hart, co-author of the MCS charter surrender; and David Reaves, another suburbanite and one of the board’s youngest members, and, a few seats away, Sara Lewis of Smokey City in North Memphis, one of the board’s senior members. At various times during Thursday night’s board meeting, they could be seen talking amiably and smiling and laughing together.

Not to attach too much significance to this or understate differences, but things could be worse. School board is the lowest-paying part-time public job and probably the most demanding. Five-hour meetings are the norm. Members must have stamina as well as convictions. When the topic is closing schools, as it was Thursday, this is not a job for the faint of heart.

It is also old-school ­­— the polar opposite of the internet chat room or newspaper comment section where anonymity is the rule. Board members speak, opine, disagree, and vote in public, side by side, for all to see and hear, on issues that change people’s lives.

The merger is unique in size and scale and may not last more than a year or two. Nashville, with the blessing of Mayor Karl Dean and education commissioner Kevin Huffman, is pushing for charter school expansion to the middle class over the opposition of the local school board. The state-run Achievement School District for failing schools is slated to grow in Memphis. The Republican-dominated state legislature is sympathetic to charters as are private donors such as the Gates Foundation. Vouchers have support. Most important, alternative schools have support from teachers and parents, who are the ultimate deciders.

After U.S. district judge Hardy Mays made his ruling last week nullifying suburban school board elections, the board gathered for the second time in 48 hours. It promised to be another long evening. Near the end of the discussion of school closings in North and South Memphis, a somewhat exasperated Chism, former principal at Germantown High School, protested that he was elected to represent the people of Shelby County.

The spectators gave him a small ovation. Chism voted against the closings, as did Whalum on most of the votes. — John Branston