school funding – Memphis Flyer

Members of the Memphis City Council and Memphis school
board hugged each other Tuesday and said a schools funding “crisis” has been
averted for a year, but it is not clear exactly how and by whose math.

After Monday’s dire warning by Mayor Willie Herenton of a
possible $450 million state funding cut for MCS, Tuesday’s developments, vague
as they were, promised better things.

Before the start of the regularly scheduled city council
meeting, councilmen Bill Morrison and Harold Collins, joined by several school
board members, came to the podium and announced, “We will work this thing out
and have a positive resolution in the near future.”

Collins said there would be no property tax increase for
city residents. In fact, the tax rate will fall from $3.43 to $3.25. MCS will be
“fully funded,” Collins said, even though the council is sticking by its
decision to cut the city school payment from $93 million to about $22 million
this year.

Interim superintendent Dan Ward, one of scores of school
system employees who came to City Hall for the council meeting, said the school
system would dip into its reserves for $38 million, leaving a balance of $55
million. Additional “savings” will result from the school system officially
recognizing that its enrollment has declined to 113,000 students, down from
widely reported but never verified enrollment figures of 118,000 and 120,000 in
the last five years or so.

The enrollment decline is significant because state funds
are awarded on a per-pupil basis. School board member Jeff Warren said declining
enrollment enables a city to legally cut its funding. Warren says the city
council cut money from schools so members could claim to be tax cutters even
though taxes for non-school public services went up. By the same token, school
board members can say they fought fiercely against funding reductions even
though the net result appears likely to be a funding reduction.

Both sides said their attorneys are continuing to work on
the funding issue. How much posturing and face-saving are involved in dodging
the “crisis” is not clear. A $450 million state funding cut, which is nearly
half the operating budget, would have practically shut down the school system. A
cut of $50 million, or roughly five-percent, would be in line with what other
city and county divisions are undergoing.

What is known is that Memphis homeowners will get a
property tax decrease on their city tax bill for at least one year. New
superintendent Kriner Cash will have to deal with Herenton, who more or less
stood by his low assessment of Cash as the survivor of a flawed search process.
And the elected school board will remain in place despite Herenton’s call for an
appointed board and a referendum on that issue.

As the week began, the Memphis City Council — primed to take on the controversial and potentially transformative issue of school funding — stood ready to become a laboratory of sorts for political scientists, be they local or visitors from Mars. The Shelby County Commission,

which has spent the last several weeks completing proposed charter changes for the August election ballot, already has been. The commission’s deliberations were originally necessitated by an East Tennessee judicial finding that nullified the constitutional status of five local officials — sheriff, trustee, assessor, county clerk, and register — and required that these offices be redefined in the county charter.

The desire of some commissioners — and, no doubt, Mayor A C Wharton — to make these offices appointive quickly ran afoul of a prevailing feeling among both Democratic and Republican commissioners to keep them subject to election. And, for the most part, the existing prerogatives of all five offices were maintained. Where change seemed inevitable was in the realm of term limits, and it appeared for a while that the five offices would be subjected to the same two-term (eight-year) limitations imposed on the county mayor and the commissioners themselves by a 1994 referendum.

But that’s where the fun began. In essence, the commission’s Democrats, led by longtime political broker Sidney Chism, began to coalesce around the idea that limitations on tenure for the five offices, if they had to exist at all, should be extended to three full terms, or 12 years. Not all Democrats were on board to begin with, but as Chism — who originally wanted no term limits at all — kept persisting, he developed some momentum for the three-term concept. Meanwhile, Republicans tried to hold firm to the two-term limit. The showdown was a classic illustration of the two parties’ divergent points of view on the role of government. As deliberations wore on, the commission considered and rejected an endless series of variations and compromises, with Republican Mike Carpenter and Democrat Steve Mulroy performing in what has become their accepted role as devisers of compromise.

In the end, during a marathon session last week, it was two Republican commissioners, George Flinn and Joyce Avery, and one hold-out Democrat, J.W. Gibson, who came off their support of the two-term limit for the express purpose of ensuring there could be a ballot initiative in August. As things stand, not only — pending voter approval — are the five redefined offices to get a three-term limit; so are the mayor and the commissioners. Score one for Chism. But he may have overreached himself when, during the third reading of the ballot resolution on Monday, he voiced an animated objection to a proviso for recalling officials. The battle lines hardened again, and, for a long while, it appeared that the ballot resolution might be in jeopardy. But this time it was Chism who had to yield, as a bipartisan consensus emerged in favor of the status quo.

It was more complicated than that, of course, and we recommend that students of horse-trading secure copies of Monday’s rather busy transcript. In the end, the commission debate was a textbook case of how government should work, and we recommend it as a model for the Memphis City Council in its own deliberations this week and thereafter.