Tag: Michelle McKissack

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School Board to Discuss Ouster of Superintendent Feagins

New Superintendent Marie Feagins engages with students during her visit to Northhaven Elementary School on April 23, 2024.. (Ariel J. Cobbert for Chalkbeat)

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board has called a special meeting for Tuesday evening to discuss terminating the contract of Superintendent Marie Feagins, who officially started in the position just eight months ago, after a protracted search.

The board in February voted to hire Feagins away from a leadership position at the Detroit Public Schools Community District, making her the first outside leader to direct Tennessee’s largest school district since it was created through a merger a decade ago.

However, tensions emerged quickly between the board and Feagins over staffing issues and plans to close and consolidate schools as part of a sweeping facilities plan.

The special meeting — scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday — caught at least one board member off guard.

“I’m just as stunned as the public,” said Michelle McKissack, who represents District 1 and has been a strong supporter of Feagins. “I learned about this at about the same time as everyone else. There has been no discussion, at least with my presence there, to warrant this meeting.”

Other school board members could not be reached or declined to comment Monday night.

Another leadership shakeup could be a jarring setback for a district that took more than a year to choose and install Feagins and faces a series of significant academic and financial challenges.

It also could put the board at odds with community leaders, many of whom were glad to see Feagins taking steps to shake up a district they viewed as top-heavy and in need of significant reforms.

After Feagins started, tensions with the board developed quickly over her decision to eliminate around 1,100 positions over the summer, her allegations of overtime abuse by some district employees at a cost of $1 million, and her administration’s slowness to address air-conditioning and other school building needs before the start of this academic year.

There were also missteps over school safety in August, just after the school year began, as Feagins narrowly avoided a walkout by school resource officers and accepted the resignation of the district’s new security chief just days after he started.

The relationships didn’t seem to improve after school board elections that replaced four of the board’s nine members.

Tensions grew over the facilities plan Feagins’ administration was developing to close or consolidate schools — a blueprint that likely would affect nearly every board member’s district.

There was also anger after the Memphis City Council rejected the district’s planned site to build a new high school in Cordova to replace Germantown High School under a 2022 agreement with Germantown and state officials. Several board members said Feagins should have leaned more on board members to lobby council members for the new site.

Feagins came to Memphis well aware of the risks of a strained relationship with board members. Her 2020 doctoral dissertation, Chalkbeat reported in May, noted that a lack of trust can prompt superintendent departures.

At a tense school board meeting on October 21, after a brief discussion with members about building challenges, Feagins became emotional when board member Amber Garcia-Huett asked her what she was most proud of so far in her brief tenure.

Her voice breaking, Feagins said: “People — leaders who keep showing up every day, committed to something they can’t see.”

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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State Lawmaker Wants to Add New Appointed Members to MSCS Board

Credit: State of Tennessee

This story was originally published by Chalkbeat. Sign up for their newsletters at ckbe.at/newsletters.

A Tennessee lawmaker said he plans to introduce legislation giving Gov. Bill Lee’s administration the power to appoint up to six new members to the board of Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Rep. Mark White of Memphis cited prolonged frustration with the board’s locally elected leadership when explaining his plans to Chalkbeat on Tuesday.

The nine members currently on the board of the state’s largest school district would remain in office under the proposal.

And the additional members would be appointed later this year based on recommendations from local officials and stakeholders, said White, a Republican who represents parts of East Memphis and the suburb of Germantown.

“I’m very concerned about the district’s direction, and I just can’t sit back any longer. I think we’re at a critical juncture,” said White, who chairs a powerful education committee in the House.

In a statement Tuesday, board Chair Althea Greene said White’s proposal is unnecessary.

“We may have had some challenges, but more interference from the General Assembly is not warranted at this time,” she said. “We have to stop experimenting with our children.”

White’s comments come as the school board is days from selecting a district superintendent to end a tortuous 18-month search process. All three finalists came from out of state last week for final public interviews.

The proposed bill also represents another attempted state foray into oversight of Memphis, spotlighting historic tensions rooted in race, politics, and power, in which both sides claim the moral high ground.

White said he is unhappy with the board’s handling of the superintendent search for a district where strong, stable, and timely leadership is especially critical. Most MSCS students are considered economically disadvantaged and continue to significantly trail state benchmarks in reading and math following devastating pandemic-related academic declines.

“I’m concerned about the three people they’ve whittled it down to, and I’m just not impressed,” said White, who did not specify the candidates’ shortcomings.

There are “highly qualified people in Memphis who know how to improve the system,” White added.

His criticisms echo recent frustrations from some local educators and community members at the prospect of an out-of-state candidate leading Memphis-Shelby County Schools. Some have called for a local candidate or for the board to permanently hire interim Superintendent Toni Williams, the district’s former finance chief.

Board member Michelle McKissack expressed surprise about White’s plan and his comments about the finalists. She praised their qualifications.

“This has been an extraordinarily robust search, and we have listened to all members of the community every way we know how to,” McKissack said.

Adding board members — particularly appointed candidates who don’t have constituents to answer to — would only complicate board governance, she said.

“It’s not going to make board operations any easier when you have a 15-person board,” McKissack said, pointing to the challenges of the previous 23-member body that oversaw the historic merger of the city and county school districts and created Memphis-Shelby County Schools a decade ago.

She added: “They think they have a problem now? Well then get ready.”

White and Sen. Brent Taylor, a Memphis Republican, expect to file their legislation this month and have been working with the state attorney general’s office “to get the language right,” White said.

The legislation could affect upcoming nonpartisan school board elections in which five seats are up for grabs. Greene is the only incumbent to have pulled a petition for the August election since the filing opened on Monday, according to Shelby County Election Commission officials.

White drew a distinction between his proposal and a 12-year-old state initiative to take over low-performing schools, mostly in Memphis, to place them with charter school operators under the oversight of the Tennessee Achievement School District.

“This is not about taking over schools. It’s about putting in place stronger governance over the elected bodies for low-performing districts,” he said.

The Memphis school board is responsible for hiring the superintendent, but also charting the direction for the district, often by prioritizing how to use the $1.2 billion it receives each year, plus the additional hundreds of millions in one-time federal funds. Board members also play a role in addressing issues of their community and educator constituents.

The board struggled with its first superintendent search for a successor to Joris Ray, who left in August 2022 amid a scandal over allegations that he abused his power and violated district policies. Last spring, board members were dissatisfied with the slate of final candidates and chose to scrap the list and reboot the selection process.

The board’s second search last fall generated 22 applicants, according to the search firm the board hired to oversee the process. Just one local candidate, Angela Whitelaw, the district’s top academics chief, was among the five finalists. Following the guidance of their own evaluations and the community’s input, the board selected three finalists:

It’s not the first time that White has introduced bills to give the state the power to intercede in local matters.

He successfully sponsored legislation in 2022 that forced the Memphis district to cede four schools to several nearby suburban districts, including in Germantown, which serves mostly white and affluent students. The move reignited persistent criticisms that the decade-long tug-of-war over the valuable school properties was essentially about race and class. Ultimately, Shelby County commissioners increased taxes, in part to help pay for a new high school for the urban district’s mostly Black students from low-income families.

White also asked the Tennessee attorney general to weigh in last year about potential conflicts of interest for Keith Williams, the executive director of a local teacher union in Memphis who was elected to the board in 2022.

Memphians have long been wary of Tennessee lawmakers who have repeatedly singled out Memphis on education matters. For instance, a controversial 2019 law created a private school voucher program that only applied to Memphis and Nashville, even though local officials overwhelmingly opposed it.

Marta Aldrich is a senior correspondent and covers the statehouse for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact her at maldrich@chalkbeat.org.

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach her at LTestino@chalkbeat.org.

Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

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“We Have to Disrupt”

Mayoral candidate Michelle McKissack set up her campaign headquarters on B.B. King Street. )Photos: Courtesy Michelle McKissack)

Even as two rather well-qualified female candidates continue in pathways that they hope will make their current mayoral runs viable, women already in power are busy constructing models of parliamentary behavior that owe very little to tradition and nothing at all to the vintage tactic of go-along-to-get-along.

Britney Thornton, the Shelby County Commission’s first-term representative from Orange Mound, has her mind set on nothing less than overturning her legislative body’s history and practice of awarding county contracts. Last Monday, the commission’s regular session began with some 17-odd items in the “consent agenda,” these being items that have been previously examined in committee and have already been worked over and are now ready for final judgment.

As each of the 17 items was called to the floor, Thornton directed the same question: How many Black women, men, Asian, white, other were invited to bid on the contract? How many followed through and bid on the contract, and who got the contract?

Almost invariably a white bidder, one used to the jargon and handling of commission business, was awarded the contract.

At one point, the item under discussion was an inmate-feeding contract that has so long belonged to Aramark that it would seem to have the status of a legacy. To the tune of a million and half dollars. Needless to say, the management of Aramark is white.

The distinguished lawyer John Farris, who represents Aramark, offered his usual smooth guarantee that the company would continue to provide inmate meals in its usual skillful mode.

To which Commissioner Thornton threw a bomb. With no substitute agency in mind, she moved to cancel the contract.

“We have to disrupt” was her way of explaining how long-standing aspects of white dominance can be eradicated.

In the end, the commission was brought to a compromise. The Aramark contract will continue for two months with what amounts to a temporary lease on the contract, with the understanding that it will be rebid on in October with a full complement of MWBE requirements favoring a non-white bidder.

Thornton is no lone wolf. She gets frequent support from other commissioners, especially those of the women on this body of seven females and six males.

Her sponsored ordinance directed at the sheriff’s department, getting the department to shed special units and multi-unit alliances, failed, although another requiring the department and the commission to take measure of pretextual road stops was mandated.

Photo: Courtesy Michelle McKissack

• There is no reason to believe that mayoral contender Michelle McKissack has anything like the long aim that Thornton has. McKissack’s style is milder and more inclined to consensus, but she is nothing if not forthright, and her adoption of a headquarters on B.B. King Street last Saturday allows her entry into the forthcoming WMC-TV mayoral debate, in which she will have every opportunity to hold her own and then some.

• For those expecting a word here on the late Governor Don Sundquist, it would have been here but for a bad modem. Expect it soon, online.

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“Got You Last!”

Van Turner speaks at his weekend HQ opening. (Photo: Jackson Baker)

We have reached a point in the mayoral contest that, if not yet the stretch drive itself, is about to get there.

The candidates with money are beginning to spend it on TV ads (Floyd Bonner, Paul Young, Van Turner, and J.W. Gibson all had fresh spots running last week) and yard signs (certain well-traveled thruways — think South Parkway and Walnut Grove, as two examples — are sprouting them like mushrooms). And, be advised, slickly printed mail-outs, in which the aspirants view themselves with pride and unlucky opponents with alarm, will soon be filling up your mailbox.

They’ve already gotten busy doing what, in athletic contexts, is called trash-talking. They’ve all done their calculations and have determined who among their adversaries can safely be ignored and who needs to be cut down to size.

Examples: Two weeks ago, when businessman Gibson opened his campaign headquarters, he not only boasted his own native-son credentials but was the beneficiary of a question voiced out loud by a key supporter, Reverend LaSimba Gray: “Mr. Gibson, you didn’t have to move to Memphis to run for mayor, did you?”

Gibson himself may or may not have been in on that one, but he certainly beamed to hear it said. The jibe was clearly aimed at two Gibson opponents, Bonner and Turner, both recently residents of the outer county, who had to weather a short-lived mandate from the Election Commission which, before being struck down in court, required of mayoral candidates a long-term presence within the city limits.

And on more than one occasion of late, candidate Michelle McKissack has called attention to the matter of what she — and various others — consider an undue number of inmate deaths in the county jail on Sheriff Bonner’s watch. The issue seems likely to keep on bedeviling Bonner, who, coincidentally or not, is widely considered a frontrunner in the race.

Candidate Turner, who until recently headed the local NAACP and is a former Democratic Party chair, has been making the most of his ideological convictions, and, at his weekend headquarters opening, publicly lamented what he saw as the apostasy of fellow Democrats Paul Young, the Downtown Memphis Commission CEO, and Bonner, both high-odds contenders with plenty of late-campaign cash.

“How you vote and what you’ve done in the past makes a difference,” said Turner. “We have one candidate who voted Republican at a time when we needed everybody in this country to support Hillary [Clinton]. Because we did not support Hillary we have a renegade Supreme Court. … I appreciate what Mr. Young has done in the city, but he was wrong on that. You have to be committed to this call and not work the other side and compromise.”

Turner’s reference was to Young’s past decision to vote in three Republican primaries, including the 2016 GOP presidential primary.

And Turner continued: “Another candidate, Mr. Floyd Bonner, has been supported by the Republican Party.” He likely was referencing the 2022 county election when Bonner, the Democratic nominee, was unopposed by the GOP and endorsed by key local Republicans.

The upshot, according to Turner: “We cannot allow this opportunity to take Memphis forward to take us back. We need progressives working for this city and working to make the city better.” “… And working to help me win,” was the unspoken quiet part.

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Of Shows and No-Shows

Monday night’s venue (Photo: Halloran Centre | Facebook)

By now, the much-ballyhooed first of two mayoral forums to be conducted by the Daily Memphian has come and gone. The five billed participants at Monday night’s event at the Halloran Centre were Paul Young, Michelle McKissack, J.W. Gibson, Frank Colvett, and Karen Camper.

The fact is, only one of these participants can be ranked among the leaders at this early pre-petition stage of the mayoral race. That would be Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Young, who is indisputably the most successful fundraiser among all the candidates.

Young reported $432,434.97 on hand in his second-quarter financial disclosure, just outdoing Sheriff Floyd Bonner, who reported $400,139.12. Young is also known to have significant support among the city’s business and civic social elite, who make up a large percentage of the donor class.

At this juncture, the main disadvantage facing Young vis-à-vis rival Bonner is a fairly enormous name-recognition gap favoring the sheriff, who has out-polled every other contestant for whatever position in each of the last two Shelby County elections.

Clearly, the need to narrow this gap is one reason, along with his undoubted public-spiritedness, that impels Young to take part, along with other relatively unknown candidates, in every public forum that comes along.

Keeping their distance from such events so far are Bonner and Willie Herenton, the even better-known former longtime mayor. Almost as hesitant to appear at such affairs has been local NAACP president and former County Commissioner Van Turner, who, like the other two, was absent Monday night, as he had been at a recent mayoral forum at First Congregational Church.

Turner, also, can claim a respectable degree of prior name recognition, and he brought into the mayoral race a fairly well-honed constituency among the city’s center to center-left voters.

The relevance of all this to this week’s forum, and to other such opportunities for exposure that may come along before petitions can be drawn on May 22nd, should be obvious. Those who need to enhance their share of public attention are likely to be attendees; those who feel more secure in their familiarity to the electorate may not be.

To be sure, both Bonner and Turner pleaded the fact of previously scheduled fundraising events as reasons for their absence on Monday night. A reliable rule of thumb in politics is that the existence of “prior commitments” can always be adduced to explain nonparticipation in a particular event.

Still, to win, it is necessary to be an active competitor, and Bonner, Herenton, and Turner, who — not coincidentally — topped the results in the only poll that has been made public so far, can be expected to rev things up in fairly short order. Bonner and Turner have been stalled somewhat by their ongoing litigation against a five-year residency requirement posited by the Election Commission.

That matter may be effectively resolved in Chancellor JoeDae Jenkins’ court at a scheduled May 1st hearing.

Herenton, meanwhile, has habitually stonewalled multi-candidate appearances throughout his long public career — out of apparent pride as much as anything else.

None of the foregoing is meant to suggest that other candidates, including the five involved Monday night, can’t break out of the pack. Politics is notoriously unpredictable.

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In the Picture

Michelle McKissack (Photo: Michelle McKissack | Facebook)

As was teased in this space last week, second-quarter financial disclosures of the Memphis mayoral candidates were expected to come due. And they did, roughly a day after last week’s issue went to print.

The contents of the disclosures have since been bruited about here and there and have been subjected to analysis. In many — perhaps most — ways, the numbers conform to advance expectations. The leaders now, in the vital metric of cash on hand, are the same two who led the field in first-quarter disclosures in January: Downtown Memphis Commission CEO Paul Young, with $432,434.97 cash on hand, and Sheriff Floyd Bonner, with $404,139.12.

Local NAACP president Van Turner was still very much in the game, with $154,633.46, as was the largely self-funding developer J.W. Gibson, with $254,015.55.

The real surprise was former Memphis-Shelby County Schools board chair Michelle McKissack, who raised $101,712.95 — in less than two months of a declared candidacy, she notes — and has $79,164.95 on hand.

Clearly, McKissack has some catching up to do but justly takes pride in her results, given her relatively late start. She and the other candidates have some time, given that candidate petitions cannot even be drawn until May 22nd. Election day is October 5th, some five months away.

In a video tweet last week, McKissack alleged about some of the media coverage that “there are those in the city who don’t want to acknowledge that it’s actually possible for a woman to be mayor of Memphis.” She focused on an unnamed article “that really touted, just, you know, highlighting the men in this race.”

Both the point of view and even some of the language in McKissack’s tweet were reminiscent of attitudes expressed by former female candidates for mayor — notably Carol Chumney, now a Circuit Court Judge, who ran for Memphis mayor twice, finishing a competitive second place to incumbent Willie Herenton in a three-way race in 2007.

Herenton, out of office now for 14 years, is a candidate again for his former office, where he served for 17 years. He and others — including City Councilman Frank Colvett, state House minority leader Karen Camper, former County Commissioner James Harvey, and former TV judge Joe Brown — will doubtless make some waves, one way or another.

Tami Sawyer (Photo: Tami Sawyer | Facebook)

• Another former mayoral candidate, Tami Sawyer, who had a singularly devoted following for her reform platform in 2019, is back on the scene after a work sojourn for Amazon in both D.C. and California. She tweeted, “Yes, I’m back in Memphis for good … I am not running for office in 2023. But y’all gonna still see me deep in this work.”

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Proposed Bill Would Encourage Doula Services

Source: Tennessee State Government

A bill that would allow for the Tennessee Department of Health to “collaborate with the bureau of TennCare in order to study existing doula certification programs” is headed to the House for consideration on April 18.

Senator London Lamar (D-Memphis) introduced Senate Bill 0394, and during a senate floor session on April 13, Lamar moved for third and final consideration of the bill. Lamar explained that as amended, it would rewrite the bill to “create a five-member doula services advisory committee.”

The text of the bill explains that the advisory committee will “advise the department of health by establishing core competencies and standards for the provision of doula services” in Tennessee. The bill also recommends reimbursement rates and fee schedules for TennCare reimbursement for doula services.

The amendment defines a doula as a “birth worker who provides childbirth education, advocacy, and physical, emotional, and nonmedical support for pregnant and postpartum women before, during, and after childbirth.”

“Doulas are vital members of the child birthing team and have proved to reduce the rates of maternal [and] infant mortality,” said Lamar.

A report from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) showed that the U.S. maternal mortality rate had increased 40 percent from 2020 to 2021.

The report also stated that the rates for Black women “were significantly higher than rates for White and Hispanic women.”

The 2021 Tennessee Maternal Mortality Rate Annual Report showed that “non-Hispanic Black women” are 3.9 times as likely to die from pregnancy-related causes compared to “non-Hispanic white women.”  President and CEO Jennifer Pepper of CHOICES: Center for Reproductive Health told the Flyer in March that both the maternal and infant mortality rate crisis in Tennessee is “dire, particularly for Black women.”

While efforts are being made to help reduce Tennessee’s mortality rate, there are other obstacles that stand in the way of this.

Mayoral candidate Michelle McKissack is urging Governor Bill Lee to provide emergency state funding for maternal health after a presentation by the Tennessee Department of Finance and Administration last week proposed that $19 million in state funds be used for programs that would have been covered by federal funds. 

According to a statement from McKissack’s office, Tennessee became ineligible for federal Title X funding as a result of “the state’s abortion ban and refusal to provide a full spectrum of reproductive health education that would include information about abortions.”

According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human services, “The HHS Office of Population Affairs (OPA) funds Title X family planning service grantees who support hundreds of subrecipients and thousands of service sites.” HHS defines family planning services as those that are related to “achieving pregnancy, preventing pregnancy, and assisting women, men, and couples with achieving their desired number and spacing of children.”

McKissack said that Lee has “floated the idea of amending the state budget to include $7.5 million in recurring funding for family planning for low-income women,” to replace the Title X grant, however McKissack is calling on elected officials to do more for women, who she refers to as “our most vulnerable population.”

This funding impacts birth control, pregnancy testing and basic infertility services for low-income individuals. According to McKissack, this will have a “deadly” impact on women and mothers in Memphis, especially Black women.

“Lack of access to quality maternal care, lack of access to family planning resources and education, and lack of access to reproductive care that includes abortions, is a trifecta for worsening the number of preventable pregnancy-related deaths in Memphis and statewide,” said  McKissack. “These deaths will primarily be Black women. This is unacceptable.”

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Karen Camper’s Race

Karen Camper as a freshman legislator in 2008 (Photo: Jackson Baker)

Depending on how one interprets the recent announcement by Michelle McKissack as to her political intentions, there are either one or two women in the running for Memphis mayor. There are still those who regard McKissack, the school board chair and former TV anchor, as having been equivocal or hypothetical in her formal announcement. Did she say she was running or merely indicate she was thinking about it?

There was no such ambiguity about Karen Camper’s intentions. The minority leader, declaring her candidacy from a position next to her grandmother’s front porch in South Memphis, proclaimed herself “ready” and reinforced the immediacy of her candidacy with some striking words: “From the front porch, we can see the conditions of our streets. We can see whether it is littered with potholes. We can hear the engines of cars roaring out of control. We can hear street racing. We can hear gunshots.”

She declared, “Memphis needs a mayor that’s willing to meet with you on your front porch.”

In so dramatizing her effort, positioning herself as having sprung right from the grassroots of inner city Memphis, Camper was ingeniously minimizing one of the potential shortcomings of her position — that her basic governmental experience, however renowned, has taken place at something of a remove from home.

Camper’s race can usefully be compared to that of a previous mayoral aspirant, Carol Chumney, who sought the office in 2007, against then incumbent Mayor Willie Herenton and MLGW CEO Herman Morris.

Like Camper, Chumney, now a Civil Court judge, had served for many years in the Tennessee state House. She did not become her party’s leader, as has Camper, but Chumney was an influential legislator, particularly in the field of children’s services, which she turned into a major public concern, and she held several leadership positions in the Democratic hierarchy, which in those days actually controlled the House.

Chumney had credentials, but they were, like those of Camper today, amassed primarily in an environment, Capitol Hill in Nashville, that was physically distant from the constituency of greater Memphis and not nearly as familiar to its voters as the governmental arenas for those public officials who had served closer to home.

Had Chumney chanced a mayoral race on the basis of her legislative qualifications, she would likely have had far greater difficulty than she did in the 2007 race, where she was a major contender from beginning to end. Indeed, she had made a Democratic primary race for Shelby County mayor in 2002, while still a legislator, and had run respectably, but well behind, against eventual winner AC Wharton, then the county’s public defender.

In 2003, though, Chumney had said goodbye to the General Assembly and run for a seat on the Memphis City Council against fellow hopefuls George Flinn and Jim Strickland. She won that race and wasted no time in broadening her acquaintance with the city’s voters and theirs with her.

In the four years leading up to the 2007 mayor’s race, Chumney was the most visible member of the council, posing challenge after challenge not only to the more questionable actions of Mayor Willie Herenton but to the good-ol’-boy presumptions of a council where pork was ladled about by members like so many reciprocated scratchings of each other’s back.

In so doing, Chumney ruffled some feathers in city hall, but she got the attention of the voters, enough so that she finished a close second to Herenton in the three-cornered mayor’s race, leading to speculation that she might have won in a one-on-one.

Karen Camper doesn’t have the advantage that Chumney had of recent and close-up tangles with the powers-that-be, but, to judge by her unusual mode of announcement, she has good grassroots instincts. And, of all the contestants, she may be most familiar with the ongoing threats to home rule posed by today’s state government. Which may be more of an issue than it may seem.