Tag: school consolidation

If at first you don’t succeed…Well, if you’re Dr. Jeff Warren of the Memphis City Schools Board, you keep trying, Charlie Brown-like, even long past a time when everybody else has lost count of your previous efforts and even after some of your fellow Board members have lost patience with you altogether.

Warren has been conspicuously looking for the Golden Mean of compromise from the very beginning of the current crisis, which began with the MC S board’s anxiety over the prospect of Special School District status for Shelby County Schools and has now entered a phase in which the anxiety is on the county side concerning the imminent forced consolidation of the two school systems.

In the minds of many supporters of the MCS charter surrender referendum, Warren’s several proposals up until this week had seemed either too favorable to county interests or too incapable of bridging the gap between MCS and SCS.

At a recent MCS “work session,” Board colleague Stephanie Gatewood chided Warren for his many solo efforts to bridge the gap between the two systems. “This is the fourth time you’ve tried to recreate, revise, or re-edit,” she told him, pointing out that so far neither of the contending boards had signed on to one of his plans.

For the record, Warren now has a new plan — his fifth, it would seem — which he put forth to the MCS Board Tuesday night. Like the last one, this one contemplates a variant of a previous plan which had emanated from the SCS board but was rejected by a majority of MCS board members.

Warren acknowledged the affinities between his new plan and the SCS precursor, including the hiring of an expert “in school governance,” the appointment of two parallel slates of parents, administrators, and other citizens by the two boards to create a common “team,” and the preparation of a referendum.

But there were “a number of changes,” as Warren said Monday night. Instead of the several alternative possibilities that might have been recommended under the SCS plan, Warren’s comes with a specific recommendation — for the model he vented last week, a consolidated district broken down into five sub-districts governed by a chancellor. Referendum language to that end would be agreed on “no later than July 1, 2012.”

And the most significant alteration in previous formulas — his own and that of the SCS alike — is that Warren’s new plan would proceed regardless of the outcome of the forthcoming citywide referendum on MCS charter surrender, scheduled for March 8, or whatever counter-legislation might emerge from the General Assembly, including creation of an SSD for Shelby County Schools.

As before, the vote on Warren’s contemplated referendum would be countywide. But the kicker is that if the referendum should fail, “Shelby County Schools will assume control of Memphis City Schools.”

That provision might assure Warren of a friendlier hearing than any of his previous plans — as “new business” Monday night, it won’t be discussed for action until the Board’s next regular meeting — but it may already have been overtaken by events.

The newest development is a plan said to be under active discussion by representatives of several of the county municipalities, sidestepping the either-or alternatives of consolidation and Special School District status with a new formulation that is essentially an SSD by another name. That would be the creation of a network of municipally operated school systems.

This alternative is under active consideration in Germantown, Collierville, Bartlett, and Arlington — though, since it would be supported by new tax levies, it might prove too burdensome for other suburban municipalities. And unincorporated portions of Shelby County would apparently be left outside the structure (though fee-based loopholes might be created allowing residents access to a given municipal system).

Legislative sanction would be needed for such a plan, as for special school districts, and one of the unanswered questions is whether currently existing school buildings and other infrastructure are the rightful property of the county or the state and whether they would need to be purchased.

If outright consolidation of the city and county systems should occur, a consensus is building toward some variation of the five-sub-district formula like that proposed by Warren. Among the other proponents of such a system are Memphis city councilman Shea Flinn and former Memphis mayor Willie Herenton.

Even state Senator Mark Norris, the GOP majority leader of the state Senate and the author of legislation designed to avert the consequences of an MCS charter surrender, has expressed himself as being open-minded to some such formula (though he also foresees it being directed by “joint boards of control.”

And David Pickler, the SCS board chairman whose call for new SSD legislation was the catalyst for the current crisis, has said that such an outcome would be preferable to other consolidation formats.

This is what you call an anomaly.

The latest development in the Memphis suburbs’ resistance to the automatic school-system consolidation that would occur with the success of a referendum to dissolve Memphis City Schools is this: Several of the outer-Shelby municipalities — Collierville, Germantown, Bartlett, and Arlington specifically among them — are actively considering creating their own school systems.

Legislation is being hatched in the Tennessee General Assembly to this end, and officials of all the cities named, and perhaps other suburban entities, are looking into the concept of a municipal-school network.

An anomaly, we said. Nay, an irony: If the project, which would involve the municipalities having to levy taxes on their residents in order to purchase existing school structures from Shelby County and to augment operating expenses, goes forward, and if the March 8 referendum of city residents should, as expected, authorize the dissolution of MCS, the current city schools would have traded places with the current county schools.

As things stand now, the urban network Memphis City Schools, technically a special school district, is funded by Shelby County but receives a substantial sum also from the City of Memphis — some $78 million annually, which, however, has been jeopardized in recent years by the Memphis city council’s reluctance to pay it, even in the face of a court order. Otherwise, the county schools and city schools both receive their funding from Shelby County government, by state law the ultimate authority responsible for administering public education.

But if the MCS charter goes, the city schools become the charge of whatever Shelby County school system remains and the direct and sole responsibility of Shelby County government. In effect, they become the county schools, while, if the separate municipal-school network in the outer county (a special school district by another name), goes forward, the county schools in effect become city schools.

Both systems will continue to be funded by Shelby County government (supported by taxes from both city and county residents), but the municipal network of schools will also draw heavily on those entities’ “urban” taxpayers, in the manner of MCS at present. Meanwhile, Memphis taxpayers will be off their own extra hook with the passing of MCS.

To repeat: the city schools will be county schools, and the county schools will be city schools.

How’s that for a Thought of the Day?

Or, to put that another way: If you can’t beat ’em, be ’em!

Shelby County Attorney Kelly Rayne, in a lengthy response to a formal complaint from County Commissioner Terry Roland, found no basis for investigating — or ruling on —vote-trading allegations made by Roland concerning Memphis City Schools board member Stephanie Gatewood.

In a sworn statement dated January 5, Roland had made several charges to the effect that Gatewood had been involved in conversations with unnamed county commissioners in which they allegedly offered to vote for her as an interim state House member if she would agree to vote to surrender the MCS charter.

On December 20, when the MCS board voted 5-4 to call for a referendum on the dissolution of its charter, Gatewood voted with the majority. In the discussion beforehand, she alluded to unnamed persons who attempted to “force my hand” on the surrender vote but said, “I am not bought and paid for,” and insisted she had not been influenced in her decision.

She seemed to refer to elected officials of some sort but did not, as indicated by Roland in his statement, specify them as having been “County Commissioners.”

And, at the time, her remarks were widely interpreted as being directed at efforts to persuade her to vote against charter surrender, not for it.

Rayne said she had reviewed Roland’s six-point complaint by four applicable standards, the Shelby County Code of Ethics, the county charter, the state Open Meetings Act, and such other state laws as might be relevant and concluded that “the allegations mentioned in your sworn complaint, if determined to be true, do not constitute a violation of any provisions” relating to these standards.

The county provisions related only to financial inducements, Rayne said. The state Open Meetings Act did not apply because the allegations did not directly involve a meeting on which a vote was taken. As for state laws in general, Rayne sent the complaint on the office of District Attorney General Amy Weirich for such action as she might consider appropriate.

The District 98 state House seat for which Gatewood was a candidate was eventually won this week by another aspirant, Antonio “2-Shay” Gatewood, who defeated Gatewood and two other candidates in a special Democratic primary.

Since there was no Republican candidate, the county commission had resolved on December 20, the very day of the later MCS vote on charter surrender, not to name an interim appointee just then to the seat, vacated by the death in November of the long-term incumbent, Ulysses Jones, but to confer the appointment later, after the Democratic primary had determined a winner.

On that understanding, Parkinson will presumably be named interim appointee to the seat at the commission’s forthcoming Monday meeting. On March 8, in a general election in which he will be unopposed, he will formally win the seat.

Meanwhile, Roland’s charges, rebuffed by Rayne, remain to be dealt with — or not — by the D.A.’s office.

In the statement submitted by Roland, no sources for his charges are directly identified. They are referred to by such locutions as: “”several members indicated, ” “phone calls from several individuals,” “a member of the Memphis City Council,” and “an anonymous female caller using a blocked number.’

Asked on Friday to identify the individuals in question, Roland declined to do so but said, “I’ll tell the District Attorney’s office everything I know.”

An alternate scenario in Roland’s complaint has it that several members had urged him to join them in voting for Gatewood, who was supported by commission chair Sidney Chism, in return for Chism’s vote to support an override of a veto by County Mayor Mark Luttrell.

The mayor had vetoed a commission measure restricting his ability to impose a uniform Internet Technology unit on the several agencies of county government. Chism did end up voting with seven other commissioners to override the veto but, when contacted, denied having any conversations with fellow commissioners that involved vote-trading on any issue.

Chism added, “I don’t believe any of this that he’s saying against Stephanie Gatewood, and it sounds to me like he’s trying to implicate fellow commissioners on his own side of the issue.” (Roland, too, had voted to override Luttrell’s override.)

Gatewood herself could not be reached for comment on Friday.

UPDATE: Commissioner Henri Brooks also made a request of County Attorney Rayne for an investigation of “alleged vote tampering involving two (2) sitting Shelby County commissioners.”

In a letter to Rayne dated December 30, Brooks referenced the “December 20 commission agenda appointing an interim State Representative for District 98 {and} subsequent deferral of said resolution….”

She went on: “Specifically, I am requesting a full report of our investigation regarding the question of who in this Commission office knew of the alleged vote tampering in the Stephanie Gatewood mater (Gatewoodgate), when did they know it, how did they know it and and what did they do?”

Unlike Roland, Brooks cited no allegations and made no accusations in particular.

Her final paragraph included this statement: “As a member of this body….this situation raises the issue of the integrity of the interim 98 State Representative seat appointment process. My primary concern is that my name shall not be a part of any of the alleged improper influence voting….” And Brooks repeats the term “Gatewoodgate,” evidently her own coinage.

On Friday, January 21, the same date as her response to Roland, Rayne addressed Brooks with a similar disclaimer to the one she gave Roland, a significant difference being that she makes no reference to passing Brooks’ complaint on to the District Attorney’s office:

“Based on the statements in your letter, there is insufficient information to make a finding as to any possible violation of he County Charter, the Shelby County Ethics Ordinance, or other County policy. In the event you have additional allegations about possible violations of any of these County provisions that need to be reviewed by this Office, please provide a sworn complaint with reasonable details regarding the referenced matter.”

(Below are key excerpts from a Flyer interview with state Senator Mark Norris (R-Collierville) conducted in Nashville in the course of last weekend’s gubernatorial-inauguration events there. These portions are an extension of a previously published report on that conversation with the state Senate’s majority leader.)

On the difference between geographical voting restrictions in 1996/97 and those of today.

The background: In 1996 a court order required that the Board positions for the Shelby County Schools be filled by popular election rather than through appointment by the Shelby County Commission, as had been customary. In commission debates about determining g the voter pool, Norris, then a commissioner representing suburban Shelby County, argued strongly that it would be unconstitutional and inappropriate for city voters to take part.

Inner-city commission members, like Julian Bolton, argued that, since residents of Memphis paid taxes that helped subsidize the county schools, they should be represented by district positions on the Board then being created and should be allowed to vote in county school board elections. Ultimately, the 6th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that only voters in the school district in question should vote and be represented on the county school board.

A key sentence in the Court’s decision was this one:

“The…problem…is the issue of whether the decision to expand the electorate to include out-of-district votes dilutes minority votes. Such a case would be presented, for example, if a city’s electorate was expanded to include white suburban or rural areas in order to prevent a black majority in an urban area from controlling their own local government.“

Since Norris now proposes that all county voters should take part in a referendum on the fate of the Memphis City Schools charter and has introduced pending legislation to that effect, he has been accused of hypocrisy. The following paragraphs constitute an answer to his critics:

Norris: They’re ignorant of the law. That’s not Mark Norris’ law….That’s the federal law. What I said then is equally true today. It’s derivative of Baker versus Carr. The analysis goes thus: In a referendum, which is not your routine commission, council, or legislative election…referenda in the eyes of the law have a special status. The question the court, if called upon to do so, asks, is, ‘What is the relevant jurisdiction?’ Quote unquote.

They do an analysis. [The late federal] Judge Jerome Turner did this is in the district court case in 1996. Board of Commissioners vs. Burson. Because at that point we had been left with the task of drawing the voting districts for the Shelby County School System after the law had changed, to elect the commissioners. We used to — the county commission previously had appointed them.

The law changed. The former commission required seven vacancies, or whatever…..We were tasked with the responsibility before the next general election to draw the voting districts. Julian Bolton and I came up with a process. He drew Plan B that was countywide, and it sort of looked like oven spokes or slices of pie. I think mine was Plan C. We agreed to go to court. To do so we adopted his plan. We adopted the countywide plan that people might talk about today.

We went to court. That plan was struck down as unconstitutional — on the grounds that, in a referendum …they did an analysis of the cash flow, the funding, the common programs, or lack thereof, the students, the system, and the court found that in order to meet the mandates of equal protection as enunciated in Baker vs. Carr, that the law protects the rights of the minority, and it does this in this case by avoiding what the court called ‘debasement.’

I can deprive you of your right to vote in several ways. It’s not just ‘one man, one vote.’ If your vote is so diluted as to be worth less than [another] vote, the court will look very carefully …That’s why the plan we had, to let everyone in the county vote, was struck down as unconstitutional, and I’m submitting to you that that’s what would happen today if the reverse is true — if you only allow one jurisdiction to vote where there are two relevant jurisdictions at stake, it’ll be struck down as well.

Norris was asked: Isn’t that a paradoxical position (in light of the court statement quoted above)?

Norris: You have to get your head around that. It’s an inversion, but it’s the same principle…
I understand that there’s an Attorney General’s opinion dealing with who is eligible to vote under [Section] 502, and the Attorney General says, well, Memphians are eligible. The Attorney General’s opinion of January 10 does not say “and no one else.” I can show you. The rule of books is that, well, 502 is silent as to who gets to vote. It just says a majority of those voting in the referendum. That’s Section 502, and that’s the only one now that, as I understand it, Memphis City Schools is relying on….

The Senate Bill 25 that I’ve introduced [providing for dual city and county votes] needs to proceed forward. That’s the current law. It is the law. People need to realize this.

Go here for Part One of the Norris interview..

In a saga whose milestones have most often been marked by conflict, stress, and high drama, a key moment occurred Wednesday afternoon with such minimal sound and fury that it almost seemed an anti-climax.

In reality, however, the January 19 meeting of the Shelby County Election Commission to formally set a date for a citywide referendum on dissolution of the Memphis City Schools charter could better be described with the familiar phrase “calm before the storm.”

Election Commission chairman Bill Giannini and his four colleagues seemed relaxed, even jovial, when they entered the auditorium at the SCEC Operations Center, and they got right down to business.

Commission attorney Monice Hagler reviewed the circumstances, including a back-and-forth on technical issues with state Election Coordinator Mark Goins, that had led, first, to a delay in setting an election date and, finally, after a court order and apparent resolution of contested points, to the selection of March 8.

Then Bill Giannini called for a voice vote of approval for the date, which came unanimously from the two Democrats and three Republicans (including Giannini). The chairman then asked for another vote on the 16 early voting sites selected by the Commission staff and announced by SCEC chief administrator Rich Holden, and, once again, there was a chorus of agreement.

Deed done, the press conference stretched out a bit anyhow, as if both the commissioners and the assembled media felt an obligation to endow the bare-bones scenario with texture and complexity appropriate to the occasion.

Reporters, who may have simply needed context to fill out their stories or segments, asked the kind of questions to which the answers were already well known — for example, whether the referendum (which, if successful, would force the de facto consolidation of the city and county school systems) would be restricted to voting residents of Memphis. It will be.

An inventive variant was a question as to whether poll workers could be from outside the city. The answer, from administrator Holden: No.

The commissioners themselves strained for detail — Giannini, for example, noting that, by scheduling the referendum on the same date as a special general election for state House District 98, the taxpayers would be saved some $50,000 (the cost of the House election by itself).

That was more illusion than reality, since the $50,000 which was already scheduled to be spent will be filled out by another $950,000 — the cost of extending the charter-transfer referendum to precincts outside 98. Total expenditures: $1 million, identical to what would have been spent for the referendum if there were no special House election.

Still, the colloquy engendered a sense of shared good will that marked the event as something of an oasis in a turbulent timeline that will include such future events as the almost certain passage of state legislation designed to impede the consolidation of districts, as well as looming litigations and other complications and contests as yet undreamed of .

The video below captures the central core of the event:

As of 9:45 Tuesday night, Memphis sovereignty over its own affairs was doubly underscored:

Rejecting a “compromise” school plan received from Shelby County Schools by a convincing vote of 7-2, the Memphis City Schools board completed a statement begun several hours earlier when the Memphis City Council voted unanimously for a resolution “accepting and approving the dissolution and surrender of the Memphis City Schools Charter.”

Both outcomes moved the looming and perhaps inevitable consolidation of the MCS and SCS systems further down the road. But that almost seemed a secondary consequence. What the two votes established first and foremost was the right of Memphis citizens to chart their own course and resolve their own destiny.

As Councilman Bill Boyd said in joining his colleagues in voting for a resolution prepared by Councilman Shea Flinn, “We are all Memphians, and we’re all representatives of the citizens of Memphis,”, and that meant, Boyd said, that “we don’t have any other choice” other than to defend the city’s right to decide by itself the fate of its own public school system.

And School Board member Martavius Jones responded similarly when asked to account for his board’s one-sided rejection of a convoluted SCS plan. The county board’s profferred plan would have forced the MCS board to rescind its dramatic December 20 vote to surrender its charter and authorize a citywide referendum on the transfer of MCS’authority to the Shelby County Schools board. Under the SCS counter-offer rejected Tuesday night county voters would have been empowered to vote along with Memphis residents for a replacement plan.

“What needs to be emphasized most is that Memphis City Schools has abided by the law. The law says Memphians have the right to control their fate,” Jones said.

Just in case the MCS Board might get cold feet and come to a different conclusion, Flinn and Council co-sponsor Harold Collins had crafted their resolution as a sort of fallback to the planned referendum. It set an effective date of March 21 for the dissolution of MCS with “an option to reconsider if the voters disapprove the referendum.” Now that the possible impediments have been removed, the Shelby County Election Commission is expected to meet Wednesday and set March 8 as a referendum date on the MCS action.

Meanwhile, the way has been laid for quick passage of legislation in Nashville that could stop the movement toward charter surrender in its tracks. Or so thinks its sponsor, state Senator Mark Norris of Collierville, the Republican majority leader.

Says Norris: “I would think that timely passage of my proposed bill would render that [the outcome of a charter-transfer referendum] moot. I doubt that they would have that referendum. If they did, I think it would be a nullity.”

His bill, based on his reading of Title 49, Chapter 2 ), Part 12 of the state legal code, a portion dealing with consolidation of school systems within the same jurisdiction, prescribes a method similar to the one just rejected by the MCS board. Like that SCS plan, Norris’ calls for a period of study, followed by a referendum prepared jointly by representatives of both affected systems. Unlike the SCS plan, the referendum contemplated by Norris’ bill would require dual approval by separate votes in city and county.

The bill is certain to be fast-tracked once the General Assembly reconvenes on February 7. It could therefore be on its way to becoming law before the presumed referendum date in Memphis of March 8 (the Election Commission was scheduled to meet on Wednesday to formalize that date) and before the March 21 date specified in the city council resolution.

Clearly, given the plethora of alternative legal realities, adjudication in the courts will be required to sort them out, and that could be a time-consuming process.

There are indications, however, that a genuine compromise solution may be in the works. School Board member Jeff Warren proposed a variant of it at Tuesday night’s Board meeting. He floated an alternative to the SCS plan that envisioned a consolidated system subdivided into five discrete administrative districts, supervised by a Chancellor. His plan was foredoomed Tuesday night by his provision for a countywide vote to achieve the system.

At one point, fellow Board member Stephanie Gatewood admonished Warren, who has put forth a series of would-be compromise plans, to no avail. “This is the fourth time you’ve tried to recreate, revise, or re-edit,” she said, pointing out that so far the other side had shown no interest in his suggestions.

Even so, Warren vowed afterward to continue trying to find some middle ground. And plans similar to the one he vented Tuesday night are in general circulation. Personalities as diverse as former mayor Willie Herenton, councilman Flinn, and state Senator Norris have all floated variants of the five-sub —district idea. Even David Pickler, the SCS board chairman whose talking out loud about seeking special school district status for SCS precipitated the current crisis, said Tuesday night the option might be worth considering “if we end up with a consolidated district.”

An awful lot of verbal hair-splitting continues to go on, with various parties to the controversy (notably anti-surrender Board member Kenneth Whalum on Tuesday night) pointing out that the current battle is being fought out not along lines of consolidation per se but concerning issues of charter “surrender” or “transfer.”

But a consolidated district is the projected end point of all the separate skirmishes, as everyone well knows, and that’s what the current war is all about.

See also John Branston’s report.