No guns, no sex, no stolen cash, no cops. Just a stack of holiday homework for U.S. District Judge Samuel H. Mays that may be the most important federal court case in Memphis in decades.
All of the parties in the schools merger case filed their final briefs on Thursday, setting the stage for Mays to decide when and how the Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools will be consolidated. The question of “if” seems moot since everyone agrees it’s going to happen sooner or later.
There are seven players in the game. Their briefs total 180 pages, plus a few hundred pages of supporting exhibits. Not exactly a full-employment act for lawyers, but a pretty good lick. Judge Mays says he will make a ruling with dispatch.
Here is a summary of the final positions. At stake: the future of two school systems with roughly 150,000 students, one (Memphis City Schools) overwhelmingly poor and black, average ACT score 16.6, and one (Shelby County Schools) majority middle-class and affluent and racially mixed, average ACT score 21.
The legalistic blah-blah about special school districts is not mere semantics. The underlying issue is who gets the bill for paying for MCS, which has a 2011 budget of $1,196,364,127. Presently, 6% comes from the city of Memphis, 30% from Shelby County, 38% from the state, 21% from federal government, and 5% from other local sources. The city council wants to get out from under the financial obligation but has booked a 18-cent property tax hike just in case. When the systems are consolidated it is possible that there will be one countywide tax for schools, not a separate tax in Memphis in addition to the county tax.