school voucher – Memphis Flyer

Push is coming to shove in the public outrage stemming from the shooting death last week of MPD Officer Joseph McKinney. And the shoving, on behalf of stouter crackdowns on local crime, is coming from more sources than ever before.

Mayor Paul Young, who has arguably been somewhat slow on the draw in fleshing out his crime program, cruising along with an interim police chief and nobody yet to fill his ballyhooed position of public safety director, is suddenly all cries and alarms.

Sounding almost like some of the more active Republican critics of Memphis crime in the legislature, Young released a statement including these words: “Together, let’s petition our judges and the DA for stronger, swifter sentencing for violent offenses. If you are part of the judicial system, hear my voice first. We need to work together to do better for our community.”

DA Steve Mulroy himself expressed anger that a $150,000 bond that he’d previously set for previous crimes committed by the youth suspected in the death of Officer McKinney had been somehow amended by a judicial commissioner to allow the youth back on the streets through his own recognizance.

And Shelby County Commissioner Mick Wright, a leading critic of the current crime wave, was warning, on behalf of his commission mates, “We are not finished. … You’re going to see some judges get exited stage left if I have anything to say about it.”

It was a definite irony that, scarcely a week after the MPD had announced the 100th homicide in Memphis this year, Young scheduled this week’s public celebration of his first 100 days in office at Mt. Vernon Baptist Church.

Perhaps the mayor will use that occasion to outline further his and the city council’s plan for a new nonprofit organization to reverse the crime trend.

• Former Shelby County Democratic chair Gabby Salinas, who in recent years ran two close races against established Republican office-holders, has a different situation on her hands this year.

She’s running for the state House District 96 seat being vacated by Democratic incumbent Dwayne Thompson. Not a Republican contestant in sight so far, but Salinas has four Democratic rivals — Eric Dunn, Telisa Franklin, Orrden Williams Jr., and David Winston. She remains the favorite.

• As mentioned in this space of late, Democrats are seriously contesting the state House District 97 seat now held by Republican John Gillespie. Mindful of the potential perils of procrastination, they brought out some heavy artillery last week.

At a fundraiser for party candidate Jesse Huseth at the home of attorney Robert Donati last week, an important attendee was 9th District U.S. Rep. Steve Cohen, the county’s senior Democratic office-holder, who formally bestowed his endorsement on Huseth and was critical of Gillespie for legislative actions intended to shift various aspects of law-enforcement authority from the city to the state.

Cohen noted that the 97th, which was redistricted by the legislature last year, would now seem to be tilted demographically to Democrats in this election year — “up three points for Huseth and up five points for Biden.”

As Huseth himself put it, the East Memphis-based district had lost “four solid-red precincts and picked up two light-blue precincts and two light-red precincts.”

The point of the redistricting, which was carried out by the General Assembly’s GOP supermajority, remains something of a mystery, although it is said that Gillespie signed off on it, thinking it gave him more potential access to‚ and opportunity to serve, the business community.

• No doubt emboldened by the local unpopularity of Governor Bill Lee’s school-voucher program, which was formally opposed by the Memphis-Shelby County School Board and by the boards of the six municipal school districts as well, Democrats are taking another crack at the state House District 83 seat held by Mark White, House education chair and a champion of vouchers.

At least one Democrat is: political newcomer Noah Nordstrom, an MSCS Spanish teacher.

God knows what will happen when the Shelby County Commission tangles with the deannexation issue — as it will, now that the legislature has its eye on the matter. The city of Memphis, self-protectively, has devised its own plan.

County government will, at some point, need to take a position — though in a sense it is passive, a bystander, once more having to absorb leftovers from the city, when and if they come, as they did, for one example, when former Memphis Mayor Willie Herenton ceded the city’s share in management of the Health Department to Shelby County during his last year in office.

Jackson Baker

Terry Roland

Commissioner Heidi Shafer urged her colleagues Monday, at the close of the commission’s meeting, to attend any or all of four information sessions to be held by the city between Thursday, February 23rd, and Wednesday, March 1st, in various neighborhoods that would be affected by the city’s plan.

Shafer, who had been a member of the city/county task force appointed a year ago to study the deannexation matter, reminded her fellow commissioners that they would be “guests and observers only, of what has been disclosed by the city of Memphis.” She pointedly cautioned them: “Just remember, whatever is deannexed by the city … guess who gets to take care of it and pay for it, but us.”

Whatever discords and discombobulations that issue may yield for the future, however, the rest of the commission’s meeting, Monday, turned into a surprising exercise in harmony — though a few harsh words kept it from being a total love-fest.

Commissioner Terry Roland, an outspoken foe of a proposed county “social media policy,” took proponents of the measure to task and bitterly denounced it as interference in the exercise of the First Amendment, insisting (in some of his milder rhetoric) that “you cannot tell somebody how to think.”

The proposed policy was devised by the administration at the prior request of the commission and was clearly aimed at curbing such embarrassments as occurred when Corrections Center deputy director David Barber, in last fall’s election aftermath, denounced then President Obama on his Facebook page as being less American than the Ku Klux Klan. Barber was encouraged to retire.

At one point, Roland created something of a mini-sensation of his own when, by way of demonstrating the kinds of things that occur in private discourse of public officials, he talked out of school on colleague Mark Billingsley, whom he quoted as opposing the bid of a candidate for Republican Party chairman on grounds that the aspirant, Cary Vaughn, was “too Baptist.”

Billingsley angrily denied saying any such thing.

As it turned out, Roland was not an outright outlier on the issue, attracting enough other nay votes to make the final outcome 6-4, with one abstention. The proposal needed an absolute majority of the commission — 7 votes — and failed.

The commission’s most compelling — and, in some ways, surprising — demonstration of unity occurred on two matters. One was a 9-2 vote endorsing legislation in the General Assembly to legalize medical marijuana. Only Billingsley and Shafer dissented.

The other matter was SB161/HB126, a bill, essentially authored by state Senator Brian Kelsey (R-Germantown), that applies only to Shelby county and would allow state education funds to be used for private institutions. In the estimation of critics, the measure would deprive public schools in Shelby County of $18 to $20 million annually.

Commissioner David Reaves, a former school board member, led the charge on that one, terming it “an assault” on public education and declaring that, if it passed, “we should be prepared to challenge it.” There was a chorus of agreement from other commissioners, and even Shafer, a supporter of what she calls “school choice,” condemned it for targeting Shelby County alone. The final vote was 10-0, with Shafer abstaining.