Tag: merger

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Opinion

Hopson and Pickler on New Board and Superintendent

Dorsey Hopson

  • Dorsey Hopson

If he has any qualms about being chosen as “permanent” Shelby County Schools superintendent by just 6 of the 23 board members he worked with for the last two years, Dorsey Hopson wasn’t talking about them Wednesday.

Asked if he could do a brief telephone interview, Hopson replied by email:

“I am deeply honored and humbled by the confidence that the board has shown in my leadership. We have so much work to do and I am excited about this once in a lifetime opportunity to lead and serve our community. We will have many challenges ahead but we will face them in a transparent and responsible way. I look forward to working with our board and the entire community.”

Hopson was legal counsel to Memphis City Schools under Dr. Kriner Cash and interim superintendent for a year. His contract details have yet to be worked out.

In its first meeting, the new “seven-member board” that is actually only six members until the seventh slot is filled, unanimously chose Hopson and told the superintendent search firm — which concluded after two months that a viable candidate could not be found given the uncertainty — the deal was done. One week ago the board had 23 members, and within a year it could have 13 members.

The ratio of students to board members in the county system is roughly 24,000-1.

David Pickler

  • David Pickler

The day after the superintendent selection, board member David Pickler was at a meeting of the National School Boards Association to discuss, among other things in the media announcement, “the lack of flexibility local public schools currently face.” He is president of the association.

Pickler said school boards in the association range in size from 3 to 23 members. He said the “ideal” size would be 5 to 9 members.

He said Hopson should have “at least a two-year contract and preferably three or four years.”

He said that if the suburbs leave the county system his district should still have representation on the county board because it includes parts of Cordova and the Southwind area that are not in Germantown. Pickler’s term ends September 1, 2014.

Categories
Opinion

Naifeh Is Wrong on Segregation Claim

Jimmy Naifeh

  • Jimmy Naifeh

One more time: Shelby County schools are not segregated. They are white schools only in the sense that a slim majority of the students in the 46,249-student system are white.

The latest offender to use this inflammatory generalization is Tennessee state Representative Jimmy Naifeh, who ought to know better. As a lifelong resident of Tipton County, he attended public schools that really were segregated by law in the 1950s. Naifeh was in high school in 1954 when the U.S. Supreme Court issued its landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education and in 1957 when President Eisenhower ordered troops to Little Rock to safely integrate Central High School.

The racial imbalance in public schools in Memphis, Shelby County, and Tipton County today is the result of many factors, but segregation by existing law is not one of them.

According to the Tennessee Report Card, there are 17,513 black students (37 percent) and 24,849 white students (52 percent) in the Shelby County public schools. Another 10 percent of the students are Asian or Hispanic.

The Tipton County school system, including Naifeh’s home town of Covington, has 11,639 students, including 2,963 blacks (24 percent) and 8,908 whites (73 percent).

The Memphis City System has 102,798 students, including 94,299 blacks (83 percent) and 8,917 whites (8 percent). NOTE: Counting students is controversial and an inexact science. The “average daily membership” for MCS differs from the “demographic profile,” which says MCS has 113,571 students. This is why the percentage of black students is 83 percent.

Private schools in Shelby County generally do not list racial breakdowns of students on their web sites.

But it is safe to say that Shelby County schools are more racially diverse than the Tipton County, Memphis, or private school systems.

At the individual school level, several of the 207 schools in Memphis are at least 99-percent black; there are a few elementary schools, including Campus, Richland, and Grahamwood, that are majority white.

In the Shelby County system, the demographic outliers are Southwind High School and its feeder schools, all of which are at least 90 percent black. Those schools are in the Memphis annexation area but are operated by Shelby County. The schools with the highest percentage of white students are in Collierville, but they are integrated to a degree that would have been unimaginable — not to mention illegal — before 1954.

The high school that Naifeh attended is closed. Tipton County has three high schools; the percentage of white students ranges from 47 percent to 82 percent.

You can spend hours looking at demographic trends and statistics. My point is simply that “segregation” is the wrong word to describe Shelby County schools. Self segregation is not legal segregation. That is not to say that there are not issues of race and class in the school merger debate, especially if private schools are included in the picture. A few years ago, federal judge Bernice Donald ruled that the county schools should be more racially balanced at the individual school level, but she was overruled.

We don’t know yet what the municipal school systems would look like or even if there will be such things. If they were to include their current city residents only, then the schools in Collierville and Germantown might well be less diverse than they are today. But in order to fill their buildings and keep their teachers working, the munis need to boost enrollment and include students from unincorporated or annexation areas.

Could there be schools in future municipal school systems that would trend toward becoming 90-percent white schools, while the future unified system could trend toward becoming 90-percent black? History shows that is possible, if not likely.

I have watched the clip of Naifeh’s remarks several times. I think he was trying to cut to the chase. This is a time for straight talk, but segregation is not quite the right word.

Categories
Opinion

Herenton Will Try, Try Again

memphis_herenton2.jpg

Willie Herenton’s bid for nine charter schools was turned down by the joint school board this week but the former mayor and school superintendent says he will resubmit his application in November.

“I think the review process is a healthy one,” he said. “It forced our team to be more specific in terms of our mission and instructional programs and curriculum design, which are all essential ingredients in quality schools. Overall, I feel that it is a fair process.”

Herenton is in the odd position of being an applicant getting “needs improvement” marks after 30 years in executive positions that generally put him on the other end of the process. All of the board members are familiar with his career, and many of them have had personal experience dealing with him. Add to that, there may be some reluctance on the part of the school board to expand charter schools along with other “escape hatches” while the merger is in the works.

In conjunction with Harmony Public Schools in Texas and the Cosmos Foundation, Herenton has applied to run seven charter schools in the city of Memphis in 2012-2013 and two more in the county in 2013-2014.

“At this point the county is crowded and does not have excess space,” he said. “In 2013 when the systems are merged there should be ample space.”

That remains to be seen. It is unclear how the merger will play out and how much shuffling of student populations there will be. Ultimately, that will depend partly on policy and partly — probably moreso — on how parents vote with their feet. There is already surplus space in city schools, and three elementary schools are being targeted for closure due to low enrollment and the condition of the buildings. While not wishing to appear critical of the pace of closure, Herenton noted that he closed 15 schools early in his career as superintendent.

In an interview, Herenton seemed upbeat and eager to continue the process.

“I may not be the best application writer but I know how to run good schools and get good results,” he said.

He agreed that his intial application should have been more specific.

“Their application process is highly technical,” he said. “They place a lot of value on format whereas I place value on substance of how you are going to improve academic achievement in the midst of poverty. We commenced putting our team together on the same night as the school board meeting. When we picked up the evaluation, we went to work that night with assistance from my strategic partner, Harmony Schools.”

The merger is going forward on two tracks. While the merged school board addresses charter school applications and other nuts-and-bolts matters, the separate transition team is doing research on other cities and taking a big-picture approach. The transition team meets Thursday at 4:30 p.m.

Categories
Editorial Opinion

The Merger

All’s well that ends well, as the old saw has it. Since the bombshell news of a proposed merger between Delta Air Lines and Northwest Airlines began to leak only on Monday, it’s premature to forecast how it will end. For one thing, the two airlines bring to this marriage of

convenience two different sets of pilots, with two different seniority systems and other benefits packages, and all that has to be reckoned with before the merger is final. Then there’s the matter of possible obstruction in Congress.

Even so, the state of the troubled airline industry is such that the merger is likely to go forward. It promises to provide a real measure of stability at a time when a troubled economy has been causing numerous smaller airlines to collapse, domino-style. Not only would the new mega-airline, to be called Delta Airlines, be a force to reckon with domestically, it would span several continents and become, ipso facto, the world’s largest global carrier. And Memphians, who had been exposed nonstop to warnings that Northwest could yank or diminish its local presence, have been assured by the prospective new management that the city will retain its hub status in the newly configured monolith.

However things develop from this point, and whatever the shape of things in the end, local airport officials are expressing optimism. And, if nothing else, a period of prolonged suspense seems to be over with. For the time being, and, hopefully, for quite a while to come, all does seem well.

Budgeting Change

As we had been warned would be the case, both major local governments — those of Memphis and Shelby County — are facing either downsized services or up-sized tax rates, and, quite likely, some combination of the two. Both Memphis mayor Willie Herenton and county mayor A C Wharton had given ample warning of the bad financial weather, and both, in moving to deal with it, have continued to push for city/county consolidation as the only real long-term solution. But, to invert a familiar phrase, that will be then, this is now, and stop-gap measures have to be found.

Even as Herenton was preparing to call for a major property-tax increase on Tuesday, members of the Shelby County Commission were looking for constructive alternatives to another increase for homeowners. Various proposals were floated by commissioners at an unprecedented emergency meeting on Saturday and in a regular budget committee meeting on Monday. Looking for virtue in necessity, the commission considered everything from massive layoffs of county personnel to another rise in the already dreaded property tax — a remedy rendered even more questionable than usual by the currently flummoxed housing market.

In the process, they revived a formerly discarded and now-retooled proposal for a privilege (read: payroll) tax that would both exempt low-income earners and allow for the general property tax to be lowered. It’s worth a try, though the state has to give its approval to this county initiative. The city will shortly have to start its own head-scratching. Lots of luck to the members of both bodies.