A recent Memphis-Shelby County Schools survey that seeks input about how to prioritize budget spending aligns with many of the priorities Superintendent Joris Ray outlined during his recent state-of-the-district address. (Courtesy: Chalkbeat)
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Mar 16, 3:56 p.m. CDT
As Tennessee’s largest school district prepares its spending plan for next school year, Memphis-Shelby County Schools officials are seeking feedback from families and community stakeholders.
From facilities improvements and digital learning resources to social-emotional support and wraparound services like health care for students, the district survey seeks input about how to prioritize budget spending.
District spending aside, the survey also asks for input on other issues, such as whether Shelby County has enough pre-kindergarten classrooms and if K-2 teachers and parents have enough support to teach children how to read. It also seeks to gauge community awareness of various services the district provides, including tutoring, the summer learning academy, and its new social-emotional learning curriculum.
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Many of the questions asked in the survey are in tandem with the priorities Superintendent Joris Ray outlined in his recent state of the district address, including retaining and recruiting high-quality educators, boosting early literacy, and reducing the student-adult ratio at the K-2 level.
The survey comes a week before the school board will host a series of community meetings to discuss the upcoming budget, ESSER spending, and the district’s renewed literacy commitment. Under its second grade retention rule that it will implement at the end of this year, all students must be able to read before entering third grade. The meetings are scheduled for:
Monday, March 21, 5:30 p.m., A. Maceo Walker Middle School, 1900 Raines Road, hosted by board members Miska Clay Bibbs and Joyce Dorse Coleman.
Monday, March 21, 5:30 p.m., Richland Elementary School, 5440 Rich Road, hosted by board members Kevin Woods, Sheleah Harris, and Billy Orgel.
Wednesday, March 23, 5:30 p.m., Snowden School, 1870 N. Parkway, hosted by board Chair Michelle McKissack and board members Stephanie Love and Althea Greene.
The board of the newly-branded Memphis-Shelby County School District on Tuesday endorsed a sweeping facilities plan that includes closing two schools, merging another two schools, and relocating several schools and programs, among other changes.
District officials said many of the changes are designed to better use schools with declining enrollment, address overcrowding at other schools, and move students out of buildings with millions of dollars in deferred maintenance.
The board agreed Tuesday night to close Alton and Shady Grove elementary schools after this school year. Alton students will instead attend A.B. Hill Elementary, and Shady Grove students will attend either Dexter K-8 School or White Station Elementary.
Dexter elementary and middle schools will merge to form Dexter K-8 School, and Mt. Pisgah Middle School will expand to include ninth grade.
In addition, three schools will relocate:
Maxine Smith STEAM Academy, a middle school, will move and share the East High School campus.
Northwest Prep Academy and the district’s Adolescent Parenting Program will move to the building formerly occupied by Airways Middle School.
Airways Achievement Academy, a K-8 school, will move to the building formerly occupied by Norris Elementary.
The changes are part of the district’s “Reimagining 901” initiative, which the board unanimously endorsed Tuesday.
The plan also calls for rezoning high school students in Memphis’ Riverwood neighborhood from Ridgeway High School to White Station High School, and for refocusing academic programming at Bolton High School on what the district calls “agristem” — agriculture, automotive, science, technology, engineering, and math careers.
Superintendent Joris Ray called the wide-ranging facilities plan the “first step to a new day” intended to revolutionize public education in Memphis.
Ray’s initial “Reimagining 901” proposal, presented last year, included constructing five schools, expanding 13 existing schools, and closing 13 to 15 schools by 2031. Ray responded to critics who said the district is rushing the changes.
“Parents, I hear you. Community, I hear you. But we can’t wait on doing what’s right for children,” Ray said in an impassioned speech before the board’s vote. “I’m committed to doing everything in my power to ensure all of our students have a world-class education, because this work is personal to me, because I was once one of those kids.”
Minutes later, the board unanimously passed the facilities plan, with no discussion, among 30-some other action items. The vote covered the district’s initiative to change its name from Shelby County Schools to Memphis-Shelby County Schools.
In a separate vote, the board approved renewing the charter contracts of several schools, including KIPP Memphis Academy Middle and KIPP Memphis Collegiate Elementary, two schools administrators had recommended for closure due to low test scores.
Before the votes Tuesday, 21 people addressed the board, most expressing either excitement or dismay about Maxine Smith STEAM Academy’s move from Middle College High School to East High School.
Andy Rambo, the father of an eighth grader at Maxine Smith STEAM Academy and of a junior at East High School who also attended Maxine Smith, commended the district for the move, and said it will make it much easier for parents like him.
Rambo also said he’s confident that combining two schools will lead to better educational opportunities for “all of Memphis’ babies,” including his 18-month-old son.
“It is a scary thing as a parent to trust a significant part of the social-emotional development of your child to someone,” Rambo said. “We cannot be more happy and confident in the decisions we’ve made.”
Conversely, Stephanie Ferreira, the mother of two East High School students, pleaded with the board to hold off on moving Maxine Smith to East and asked for “due diligence and investment” in working with parents and answering their questions.
“The position that we’re in as parents is one of confusion regarding a plan that many of us have just learned about over the past several weeks,” Ferreira said, adding many “walked away from the [district’s community] meetings with unanswered questions about a plan that was vague.”
Ray later defended the district’s plan as well-founded in extensive research, and also disagreed with complaints from some people that they weren’t well-informed about the proposed facilities plans.
“We don’t make haphazard decisions. We don’t just act without consulting the community, without asking the right questions, without garnering feedback,” Ray said.
While board member Althea Greene acknowledged some parents and community members are concerned about the changes, she said she is happy with the plan and the board’s decision.
“As we ‘Reimagine 901,’ we realize that things will have to change,” she said.
Asked after the meeting about the board’s lack of discussion before voting, Greene said members asked questions and discussed the proposal at previous committee meetings, and it was good they didn’t have to “waste time” at Tuesday’s business meeting.
Board Chair Michelle McKissack echoed Greene’s comments, saying the proposals approved Tuesday are not just about facilities, but also about the district “firing all of its cylinders” at its mission.
“It’s going to be difficult and not everyone is going to fully agree with it, but you have to look at the big picture and that’s what ‘Reimagining 901’ is all about,” she said. “It’s all about not just approving our school buildings, but what’s happening in the buildings.”
Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.
Blue Oval City, Governor Bill Lee’s free money to tourists, and Shelby County Schools’ high-priced air purifiers all made the 2021 “Pork Report,” the annual review of wasteful government spending.
The Nashville-based Beacon Center, a non-partisan, free-market think tank, issues the report each year. Its new Pork Report marks the 16th year the agency has taken aim at what it considers wasteful government spending in Tennessee. Last year, the report took aim at a $2.3 million taxpayer grant for an AutoZone expansion and a $4.2 million grant to produce the now-cancelled Bluff City Law television show.
“From no-bid contracts in Nashville to giving away kayaks in Johnson City, there is no shortage of government waste and abuse in this year’s Pork Report,” said Mark Cunningham, Beacon’s vice president of strategy and communications. “While this report is meant to be lighthearted, it’s important to highlight how the state and local governments have misused and abused our tax dollars this year and shows that government waste is a bipartisan problem.”
Blue Oval City, the $5-billion proposed Ford plant in West Tennessee, topped the report this year with what will be a $1 billion “handout” from Tennessee taxpayers.
“After legislators already allocated more than $189 million to make the 4,100 acre site shovel-ready, the state called a special session to give another half billion dollars to Ford Motor Co., along with nearly $400 million more for infrastructure, legal fees, and the formation of a Megasite Authority, meaning taxpayers will have ponied up over $1 billion, more than double the state budget for Mental Health and Substance Abuse Services, to lure the Mustang automaker to the state,” reads the report.
In July, Lee worried that tourists weren’t visiting Tennessee on Covid concerns. To prove that the Volunteer State was ready to party, Lee put his money (well, our money) where his mouth is. He launched the national “Tennessee On Me” campaign that gave away 10,000 free airline vouchers to Nashville, Memphis, Chattanooga, and Knoxville with the purchase of a 2-night stay at hotels here. However, many did not like the program’s $2.5 million price tag.
”Government shouldn’t attempt to revive an industry with handouts, particularly when those handouts would go primarily to out-of-state residents and could only be spent on a select few cities, airlines, and hotels,” reads the Pork Report.
The Beacon Center also targeted a Shelby County Schools program to improve air quality. The system got $25 million from state funds for a contract awarded to Global Plasma Solutions for air purifiers. A lawsuit filed on the contract claimed the company’s product weren’t proven and that the company preys on those “desperate to clean the air by using deceptive marketing tactics,” according to the report.
”According to county leaders, taxpayers should not be worried about the cost because the money didn’t come from the general fund or other local dollars, but rather from Covid-19 relief money,” reads the report. “Clearly, the county doesn’t realize taxpayer money comes from taxpayer pockets, whether or not it’s first rerouted through Washington, D.C.”
Paul McKinney, director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
The young student knew how far the guidance of a good music teacher could take him. “It was assumed that you would play jazz,” he wrote many years later. “Memphis’s young musicians were to unwaveringly follow the footsteps of Frank Strozier or Charles Lloyd or Joe Dukes in dedicating their lives to the pursuit of excellence.” The young man had a jazz combo with his friend Maurice. “Because he cosigned the loan for the drums, loaned us his car, and believed in us, Maurice and I were both deeply indebted to Mr. Walter Martin, the band director. You could hear a reverence in his voice when he spoke Maurice’s name.”
Yet he gained more than material assistance from his high school education. “I took music theory classes after school. Professor Pender was the choral director at Booker T. Washington, and like the generous band directors, Mr. Pender made an invaluable contribution to my musical understanding.” Pondering his lessons on counterpoint, the student thought, “What if the contrapuntal rules applied to a twelve-bar blues pattern? What if the bottom bass note went up while the top note of the triad went down, like in the Bach fugues and cantatas?” And so, sitting at his mother’s piano, he wrote a song.
He had only just graduated when the piece he composed came in handy. Though it was written on piano, he suddenly found himself, to his amazement, in a recording studio, playing a Hammond M-3 organ. He thought he’d try his contrapuntal blues on this somewhat unfamiliar instrument. Why not?
That’s when the magic went down on tape, and ultimately on vinyl. It was an unassuming B-side titled “Green Onions.” To this day, the jazz/blues/classical hybrid that sprung from a teenager’s mind remains a cornerstone of the Memphis sound. The teenager, of course, was Booker T. Jones, co-founder of Booker T. and the MGs. As he reveals in his autobiography, Time is Tight: My Life, Note by Note, his friend, so revered by the band director at Booker T. Washington High School, was Maurice White, future founder of Earth, Wind & Fire. Their lives — and ours — were forever changed by their high school music teachers.
It’s a story worth remembering in these times, when the arts in our schools are endangered species. And yet, while you don’t often hear of band directors cosigning loans or handing out car keys anymore, they remain the unsung heroes of this city’s musical ecosystem. The next Booker T. is already out there, waiting to take center stage, if we can only keep our eyes on the prize.
Mighty Manassas The big bang that caused the Memphis school music universe to spring into being is easy to pinpoint: Manassas High School. That was where, in the mid-1920s, a football coach and English teacher fresh out of college founded the city’s first school band, and, right out of the gate, set the bar incredibly high. The group, called the Chickasaw Syncopators, was known for their distinctive Memphis “bounce.” By 1930, they’d recorded sides for the Victor label, and soon they took the name of their band director: the Jimmie Lunceford Orchestra. They released many hit records until Lunceford’s untimely death in 1947.
Paul McKinney (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
Nearly a century later, Paul McKinney, a trumpet player and director of student success/alumni relations at the Stax Music Academy (SMA), takes inspiration from Lunceford. “He founded his high school band and took them on the road, with one of the more competitive jazz bands in the world, right there with Count Basie and Duke Ellington. And I’ve tried to play that stuff, as a trumpet player, and it’s really, really hard! And then one of the best band directors in Memphis’ history, after Jimmie Lunceford, was Emerson Able, also at Manassas.”
Under Able and other band directors, the school unleashed another wave of talent in the ’50s and ’60s, a series of virtuosos whose names still dominate jazz. One of them was Charles Lloyd, who says, “I went to Manassas High School where Matthew Garrett was our bandleader. Talk about being in the right place at the right time! We had a band, the Rhythm Bombers, with Mickey Gregory, Gilmore Daniels, Frank Strozier, Harold Mabern, Booker Little, and myself. Booker and I were best friends, we went to the library and studied Bartok scores together. He was a genius. We all looked up to George Coleman, who was a few years older than us — he made sure we practiced.”
Meanwhile, other talents were emerging across town at Booker T. Washington High School, which spawned such legends as Phineas Newborn Jr. and Herman Green. It’s no surprise that these players from the ’40s and ’50s inspired the next generation, like Booker T. Jones, Maurice White, or, back at Manassas, young Isaac Hayes, yet it wasn’t the stars themselves who taught them, but their music instructors. Although they didn’t hew to the jazz path, they formed the backbone of the Memphis soul sound that still resounds today. As today’s music educators see it, these examples are more than historical curiosities: They offer a blueprint for taking Memphis youth into the future.
Paul McKinney with his father Kurl, a retired music teacher, and his brother Alvin, a saxophonist (Photo: Yuki Maguire)
Making the Scene And yet the fact that such giants still walk among us doesn’t do much to make the glory days of the ’30s through the ’60s within reach today. For Paul McKinney, whose father Kurl was a music teacher in the Memphis school system from 1961 to 2002, it might as well be Camelot. And he feels there’s a crucial ingredient missing today: working jazz players. “All the great musicians that came out of Memphis in the ’50s and ’60s were a direct result of the fact that their teachers were so heavily into jazz. The teachers were jazz musicians, too. We teach what we know and love. So think about all those teachers coming out of college in the ’50s. The popular music of the day was jazz! And the teachers were gigging, all of the time.”
Kurl, for his part, was certainly performing even as he taught (and he still can be heard on the Peabody Hotel’s piano, Monday and Tuesday evenings). “Calvin Newborn played guitar with my and Alfred Rudd’s band for a number of years,” he recalls. “We played around Memphis and the surrounding areas.” That in turn, his son points out, brought the students closer to the world of actual gigs, and accelerated their growth. In today’s music departments, Paul says, “there are not nearly as many teachers who are jazz musicians. As a jazz trumpeter and a guy who grew up watching great jazz musicians, that’s what I see. Are there a few band directors who play it professionally? Yes. But there aren’t many.
Trombonist Victor Sawyer, who works with SMA and MMI (Photo: Victor Sawyer)
Trombonist Victor Sawyer works with SMA but also oversees music educators for the Memphis Music Initiative (MMI). Both nonprofits, not to mention the Memphis Jazz Workshop, have helped to supplement and support public music programs in their own ways — SMA by hosting after school classes grounded in local soul music, MMI by helping public school teachers with visiting fellows who can also give lessons. Sawyer tends to agree that one important quality of music departments past was that the teachers were working jazz musicians. “All these people from the ’50s, ’60s, ’70s, and before have stories of going to Beale Street and checking out music and having the opportunity to sit in. I feel like the high schools in town today aren’t as overtly and intentionally connected to the music scene. So you’re not really seeing the pipelines that you did. When you don’t have adults who will say, ‘Come sit in with me, come see this show,’ you lose that natural connectivity. So you hear in a lot of these classes, ‘You can’t do nothing in Memphis. I’ve got to get out of Memphis when I graduate.’ That didn’t used to be the mindset because the work was here, and it still is here; it’s just not as overt if you don’t know where to look.”
Music Departments by the Numbers A sense of lost glory days can easily arise when discussing public education generally, as funding priorities have shifted away from the arts. The Center on Budget and Policy Priorities calls the years after the 2008 recession “a punishing decade for school funding,” and Sawyer contrasts the past several decades with the priorities of a bygone time. “After World War II, there was a huge emphasis on the arts. Every city had a museum and a symphony. Then, people start taking it for granted, and suddenly you have all these symphonies and museums that are struggling. The same for schools: There’s less funding. When STEM takes over, arts funding goes down. The funding that the National Endowment of the Arts provides for schools has gone down dramatically.”
Simultaneously, the demographics of the city were shifting. “Booker T. Washington [BTW], Hamilton, Manassas, Douglass, Melrose, Carver, and Lester were the only Black high schools in the late ’50s/early ’60s. So of course people gathered there,” Sawyer says. “You’d have these very tight-knit cultures. Across time, though, things became more zoned; people became more spread out. Now things are more diffuse.”
Not only did funding dry up, enrollment numbers decreased for the most celebrated music high schools. Dru Davison, Shelby County Schools’ fine arts adviser, points out that once people leave a neighborhood, there’s not much a school principal can do. “What we’ve seen at BTW is a number of intersecting policies — local, state, and federal — that have changed the number of students in the community. And that has a big impact on the way music programs can flourish. And more recently, it’s been an incredibly difficult couple of years because of the pandemic. Our band director at Manassas, James McLeod, passed away this year. So we’re working to get that staff back up again, but the pandemic has had its toll on the programs.”
Davison further explains: “The number of the kids at the school determines the number of teachers that can work at that school. So at large schools like Whitehaven or Central, that means there are two band directors, a choir director — fully staffed. But if you go to a much smaller school, like BTW and Manassas, the number of students they have at the schools makes it difficult to support the same number of music positions. That’s a principal’s decision.”
A four-time winner of the High Stepping Nationals, Whitehaven High School’s marching band plays at a recruiting rally. (Photos: Justin Fox Burks)
The Culture of the Band Room Even if music programs are brought back, the disruption takes its toll. One secret to the success of Manassas was the through-line of teachers from Lunceford to Able to Garrett and beyond. Which highlights a little recognized facet of education, what Sawyer calls the culture of the classroom. “When you watch Ollie Liddell at Central High School or Adrian Maclin at Cordova High School, it’s like, ‘Whoa! Is this magic?’ These kids come in, they’re practicing, they know how to warm up on their own. But it’s not magic. These are master-level teachers who have worked very hard at classroom culture. The schools with the most thriving programs have veteran teachers who have been there a while, so they have built up that culture.”
In fact, according to Davison, that band room culture is one reason music education is so valuable, regardless of whether or not the students go on to be musicians. “I’m just trying to help our teachers to use the power of music to become a beacon of what it means to have social and emotional support in place. As much as our music teachers are instilling the skills it takes to perform at a really high level, they’re also creating places for kids to belong. That’s been something I’ve been really pleased to see through the pandemic, even when we went virtual.” Thus, while Davison values the “synergy” between nonprofits like SMA or MMI and public school teachers, he sees the latter as absolutely necessary. “We want principals to understand how seriously the district takes music. It’s not only to help students graduate on time but to create students who will help energize our community with creativity and vision.”
Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School (Photo: Justin Fox Burks)
And make no mistake, the music programs in Memphis high schools that are thriving are world-class. By way of example, Davison introduces me to Kellen Christian, band director at Whitehaven High School, where enrollment has remained reliably large. With a marching band specializing in the flashy “show” style of marching (as opposed to the more staid “corps” style), Whitehaven has won the High Stepping Nationals competition four times. (Central has won it twice in recent years.) Hearing them play at a recruiting rally last week, I could see and hear why: The precision and power of the playing was stunning, even with the band seated. Christian sees that as a direct result of his band room culture. “Once you have a student,” he says, “you have to build them up, not making them feel that they’re being left out. So we’re not just building band members; we’re building good citizens. They learn discipline and structure in the band room. That’s one of the biggest parts of being in the band: the military orientation that the band has.”
Lured into Myriad Musics But Christian, a trumpeter, is still a musician first and foremost, and he sees the marching band as a way to lure students into deeper music. “Marching band is the draw for a lot of students,” he says. “When you see advertisements for bands from a school, you don’t see their concert band, you don’t see their jazz bands. The marching bands are the visual icons. It’s what’s always in the public eye.” But ultimately, he emphasizes, “I love jazz, and marching band is the bait. You’ve got to use what these students like to get them in and teach them to love their instrument. Then you start giving them the nourishment.”
As Sawyer points out, that deeper nourishment may not even look like jazz. “Even with rappers, you’ll find out they knew a little bit about music. 8Ball & MJG were totally in band. NLE Choppa. Drumma Boy’s dad is [retired University of Memphis professor of clarinet] James Gholson!” Even as Shelby County Schools is on the cutting edge of offering classes in “media arts” and music production, a grounding in classic musicianship can also feed into modern domains. True, there are plenty of traditional instrumentalists parlaying their high school education into music careers, like David Parks, who now plays bass for Grammy-winner Ledisi and eagerly acknowledges the training he received at Overton High School. But rap and trap artists can be just as quick to honor their roots. “Young Dolph, rest in peace, donated to Hamilton High School every year because that’s where he went,” notes Sawyer. “Anybody can do that. Find out more about your local school, and donate!”
Reminiscing about his lifetime of teaching music in Memphis public schools, Kurl McKinney laughs with his son about one student in particular. “Courtney Harris was a drummer for me at Lincoln Junior High School. He’s done very well now. Once, he said, ‘Mr. McKinney, I’ve got some tapes in my pocket. Why don’t you play ’em?’ I said, ‘What, you trying to get me fired? All that cussin’ on that tape, I can’t play that! No way! I’m gonna keep my job. You go on home and play it to your mama.’
“But I had him come down to see my class, and when he came walking in, their eyes got as big as teacups. I said, ‘Class, this is Gangsta Blac. Mr. Gangsta Blac, say something to my class.’ So he looked them over and said, ‘If it hadn’t been for Mr. McKinney, I would never have been in music.’” Even over the phone, you can hear the former band director smile.
Tennessee’s Attorney General is seeking a stay on the federal court decisions that allowed mask mandates back in some Tennessee schools.
Governor Bill Lee ordered that parents could opt their children out of mask mandates at public schools earlier this year. Attorneys in Shelby County and Knox County later won legal decisions that nullified Lee’s order and allowed school systems in both places to reinstate mask mandates.
Attorney General Herbert Slatery announced Monday afternoon he has appealed and will immediately seek a stay of those federal district court decisions.
“These orders have impeded the governor’s executive authority during an emergency to direct the state’s public health response, which is why this office will be appealing those decisions,” Slatery said in a statement.
One reason a federal judge struck down Gov. Bill Lee’s mask opt-out order in Shelby County is that students wearing face masks in school is more efficient, easier, and cheaper than Lee’s plan to protect disabled students.
U.S. District Court Judge Sheryl Lipman’s Friday ruling says that Shelby County’s mask mandate for students is legal. The ruling strikes down Lee’s order that allowed parents to opt their children out of the mandate. This means that all students will have to wear a mask at school in Shelby County starting Monday.
Lee’s opt-out order was delivered in mid-August. Legal challenges to it rose later from Shelby County and private attorneys working for disabled school children at greater risk of Covid’s effects than most. Attorneys said those student could not safely return to school with other maskless students. On these complaints, Lipman had temporarily halted Lee’s order earlier this month, but the order was set to expire Friday.
The new order states plainly, “schools cannot implement adequate health measures to ensure Plaintiffs’ access to school with the executive order in place.” The “unmasked presence” of other students “creates the danger to these plaintiffs.”
The order reads that local school boards won’t be able to give these disabled students reasonable accommodation to keep them from harm. Lee’s order, it says, eliminated Shelby County’s mask mandate “to create more costly and complex measures to protect every child with a disability.”
Lipman said Lee and members of his adminstration have said publicly that masks reduce the transmission of Covid-19. Mask requirements were already in place in Shelby County with set-ups for classrooms, hallways, cafeterias, school buses, libraries, and P.E. classes — none of which would need to be changed with the existing mandate.
To do it Lee’s way and individualize processes and supports for disabled students could possibly come with new facilities like larger gyms or outdoor seating areas. It could also call for more teachers to monitor masked and unmasked students, as well as complex policies and schedules for moving between classes or to school buses. All of these could change, too, if parents change their minds on masking their children.
”The accumulation of costs, alternative schedules, and other changes stands in stark contrast to the cost-effective, minimally burdensome requirement for children to wear masks when at school,” Lipman’s order reads.
For the time being, at least, masks must be worn in Shelby County Schools, with no exceptions. On Friday, September 3rd, federal Judge Sheryl Lipman issued a temporary restraining order against Tennessee Governor Bill Lee’s Executive Order 84, which allows parents to opt their children out of mask mandates issued by school districts, such as Shelby County Schools.
Lee’s executive order was issued on August 16th. Shelby County parents of two children with disabilities filed a lawsuit on Friday, August 27th, and filed a Motion for Temporary Restraining Order and Preliminary Injunction. In the wake of a hearing on Monday, August 30th, the federal judge issued the order, which temporarily blocks Lee’s order.
The parents claim that Lee’s Executive Order 84 denies children with disabilities their rights under the American with Disabilities Act by denying them the ability to “access reasonable protection from the threat of exposure” from Covid-19.
“Plaintiffs seek urgent relief preventing the enforcement of Governor Lee’s Executive Order No. 84 (‘Executive Order’), which provides parents or guardians of children in Tennessee the right to opt out of wearing masks in schools, even if the school, school system, local health department or other governmental entity otherwise requires that masks be worn,” the judge’s ruling says.
Lee argued that the plaintiffs have no standing, as the students “have not been excluded from a public service or program.” But, according to the judge’s order, “Plaintiffs offered sufficient evidence at this stage for the Court to conclude that the Executive Order’s opt-out provision interferes with Plaintiffs’ ability to access services at their public schools through a reasonable accommodation — required mask coverings — as required by the 3 Shelby County Health Department’s Health Directives.”
A hearing on the Motion for Preliminary Injunction is set for Thursday, September 9th.
Memphis-Shelby County Schools Superintendent Joris Ray (Credit: Shelby County Schools/Facebook).
As the number of Covid-19 cases increase in Shelby County and Tennessee, some parents want a virtual learning option for students.
But a Tennessee Department of Education (TDOE) rule stands in the way of Shelby County Schools (SCS) offering all students virtual learning options.
The rule passed in April lays four conditions that must be met for districts to implement a Continuous Learning Plan (CLP).
The first is that the governor has declared a state of emergency or disaster. Additionally, the emergency or disaster must disrupt the traditional operations of the school district. School districts must also provide notice to the TDOE justificating the implementation. Finally, the TDOE must approve the district’s request.
SCS superintendent Joris Ray said Tuesday that the district “must comply with the law as we continue to push legislators to allow local control.”
Currently, the only virtual learning option for SCS students is through the Memphis Virtual School, which is open to grades 4-12 and not associated with any one school in the district. However, the application period to enroll in the virtual school has ended for this school year.
The school offers asynchronous instruction with no live teacher. The TDOE rule doesn’t allow live synchronous learning, Ray said.
“It’s not a choice of this superintendent or this school board,” Ray said. “We’re just trying to arm this community with facts.”
As SCS explores ways to petition the state to allow the implementation of CLP, Ray encourages parents to share concerns about in-person learning with Tennessee lawmakers.
Gov. Bill Lee said Tuesday that he does not want students to go back to virtual learning and the state has no plans of changing the rule passed in April.
“Currently, there’s no plan that allows them to go back to virtual learning so we’ll take that one step at a time, but our hope is that we won’t move in that direction,” Lee said.
As of last week, 449 Covid-19 cases have been reported among SCS students and teachers, according to a new dashboard launched by the district Tuesday.
Careful readers of this paper may notice that we have changed our style guide on “Covid-19.” For more than a year, the Flyer style was to capitalize each letter of the word. More and more, it began to feel as though the paper were shouting at the reader, not unlike the sporadic capitalization in the deranged tweets of the former president. So, following the example of a multitude of other legitimate publications, we’re choosing to style the word as “Covid.”
That we have been writing about this disease for long enough and often enough to necessitate not one, but two entries into the style guide is, for me at least, a source of dismay. I’m sure most of us have had some version of this moment — the seemingly innocuous event that reminds you how long we’ve been dealing with this problem. If our governor has his way, it may be never ending.
On Monday, August 16th, Governor Bill Lee issued an executive order allowing parents to opt their children out of mask mandates imposed by local school districts, such as that of Shelby County Schools. SCS Superintendent Joris Ray immediately announced that he was meeting with SCS board members and their counsel to “review the legalities of Governor Lee’s Executive Order 84.” I imagine the same situation is happening in Davidson County and that the state will be hit with a slew of lawsuits. Again.
What worries me is that we continue to allow a fanatical minority to dictate the terms of acceptable behavior. According to a recent Axios-Ipsos poll on mandatory masking in schools, 69 percent of people polled were for the measure. What’s more, 44 percent of Republicans agreed. Let that be a reminder that all this back-and-forth, all this strife and tension, the backsliding after hard-fought gains against the depredations of the disease, is due to the whims of a very small segment of the population.
To me, it seems Lee has sidestepped the (expensive) issue of calling a special legislative session while still delivering up an executive action that will play well on Fox News. “Parents know best” and “the government can’t make my health decisions for me” are old standards, and I’m sure his supporters will eat that up. Getting out of this mess will take work and sacrifice, but that’s a hard sell to voters, and anyway, success isn’t guaranteed. But there’s a vocal segment of the population who will remember this as a stand against tyranny. And those people vote.
“No one cares more,” tweeted Lee, “than a parent.” The problem is that not every parent is a virologist or nurse or medical doctor. Parents may care the most, but caring does not necessarily equal expertise. I have no doubt that my mother loves me, but I also remember that a frequent pastime was taking my sister and me to the library, then retiring to the smoking section of Perkins or CK’s, where she would drink coffee, smoke, and draw while my sister and I read. Sure, we turned out okay (Look, Ma, no asthma!), but I think any random selection of pediatricians would deliver the verdict that the smoking section of a diner does not make the best playground.
So we’re stuck, all of us, bending to the whims of a few because they’re reliable voters who don’t ask for any meaningful change. A viable political candidate, for these voters, is not one who brings jobs to the state or works to improve healthcare access. No, they simply have to tout a gold-star NRA rating, a willingness to waste state funds defending the newest futile and cruel version of a “bathroom bill,” and say something generic about freedom.
But it’s a plywood freedom, a facade, a papier-mâché cutout of some red-white-and-blue fairytale. It’s a freedom without obligation or responsibility, and such a thing is a myth. Anyone selling that version of life is a snake-oil salesman right out of The Music Man.
So, as The New York Times this week reports that the Biden administration is set to recommend booster shots of the Covid vaccine for eligible adults, we see the damage that can be done by those who demand access to society’s benefits without participating in its responsibilities.
I hope those of us who feel that way will abandon this selfish school of thought, step up, and do their part. Get vaccinated, wear a mask, stop hurling insults at healthcare workers under the guise of protest.
In the meantime, I hope we don’t have to update our style guide entry on Covid again.
On Wednesday, August 12th, 73 House Republicans sent a letter to Governor Bill Lee asking him to call a special legislative session to consider legislation about counties requiring that our children wear masks in schools. Though Lee refrained from calling a special session, he did issue an executive order on Monday, August 16th, allowing parents to opt their children out of mask-wearing, regardless of their school district’s rules.
Around 2010, Republicans passed and touted virtual schools in Tennessee. When the pandemic hit and people wanted virtual, they said it was bad and children needed to be in the classroom. When children returned to the classroom and masks were required to keep them and teachers safe, Republicans wanted to take the masks away.
Now, they’ve come up with another new plan for our children. But this one puts our babies, teachers, and families at even more risk.
This is interesting because I thought Republicans campaigned on smaller government and local control. However, it appears that Democrats in the Tennessee legislature are the real advocates for smaller government and local control. Republicans on the campaign trail talk about local control, but in reality they’re for state control when it comes to something that runs counter to the national Republican agenda and, in many cases, the defunct Trump playbook.
This happened when Memphis removed the Nathan Bedford Forrest statue in what is now Health Sciences Park. It happened earlier this year in the discussions about teaching our young people about race relations in a comprehensive manner. It’s happening again, except this time, they are affecting the safety of our children, our teachers, and our citizens.
The statistics are sobering. According to a case count compiled by The New York Times, the daily average of Covid-19 cases in Tennessee more than doubled (+126 percent) in 14 days. The same for the numbers of Tennesseans hospitalized (+109 percent). According to the Tennessee Department of Health, cases among children under 10 rose sharply in the beginning of August, once again more than doubling. So far, the state has counted more than 52,000 cases in patients 10 years old and younger, and six deaths. To some lawmakers, who are making their arguments based on percentages, six deaths may be acceptable to them. To me, six deaths is too many — and those six deaths could possibly have been prevented.
Now, in spite of those alarming numbers and the fact that only six Tennessee counties have implemented some form of a mask mandate, Republican legislators wanted to bring lawmakers back to Nashville in order to issue vouchers as a punishment/alternative for those parents who don’t want their children to have to wear a required mask (only indoors) while in school. This idea would have allowed them public money to take their children to a private school where masks are not required, the school voucher financial plan being a goal Tennessee Republicans have pursued with vigor. Though Lee’s executive order effectively removes vouchers as an option for this school year, by making masks optional by a state-level executive order, the governor has again cribbed notes from the GOP playbook of undermining local government. This time, the issue is not one of a public park or school curriculum, but of the health and safety of our children.
This is way too much for the citizens of our state. The continued adversarial relationship between the state and Shelby and Davidson counties (the state’s largest contributors of tax dollars and resources) is nonproductive and stressful to all citizens.
How do you say decisions on community health should be made locally and in the very same breath and sentence remove local control in regards to children wearing masks at school? Many children in Shelby County and across the state live in multigenerational households. More and more children are requiring hospitalization when contracting Covid and can easily transmit the virus to parents and other family members whom they may come in contact with. These conditions may prove debilitating or fatal for a child or their family members. I disagree with the executive order. It is irresponsible. The goal is to stop the spread of the virus in Tennessee. This executive order in no way will curb the spread of the virus. As a matter of fact, it may accelerate the spread of Covid in our state.
Furthermore, trying to live and keep one’s family alive and healthy through this pandemic is stressful enough in and of itself. I pray that those of us who are in state leadership will take a few breaths and give local government and leadership an opportunity to govern without the threats coming from “little big brother.” Remember, we are talking about real and actual lives and livelihoods.
Antonio Parkinson is a Democratic member of the Tennessee House of Representatives representing District 98.
