Sheleah Harris – Memphis Flyer

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board relaxed its minimum requirements for the district’s superintendent role, allowing interim Superintendent Toni Williams to remain a candidate for the permanent leadership job, even though she lacks classroom experience.

But despite months of discussions aimed at forging consensus about what they want in a leader and how to proceed with the search, board members nearly put off making a decision on the policy, and ultimately fell short of presenting a united front.

Eight of the board members voted for the change in the job requirements. The ninth, Vice Chair Sheleah Harris, abstained from the vote and denounced the board’s decision. Then she announced she would quit her elected seat.

Before the amendments approved Tuesday, board policy required candidates to have a certain amount of in-school experience and training in education. Under the new requirements, the board could consider a candidate who has 10 years of work experience and advanced degrees in any of several fields, rather than just education. Board member Amber Huett-Garcia suggested the updates to the existing policies.

Board members also voted to reopen the application for the superintendent role, hoping to solicit more candidates. Those who apply will have to meet the updated requirements, plus a revised set of desired qualifications the board also approved.

The decisions Tuesday reactivate a search that has been suspended for nearly two months, as board members tried to resolve differences and misunderstandings about the search process.

“We’ve been hanging this over the heads of the public for far too long,” board member Frank Johnson said of the policy vote.

The board policy on minimum requirements emerged as a sticking point just as the search was set to narrow to three finalists. Search firm Hazard, Young, Attea and Associates told Chalkbeat it did not apply the board’s requirements for in-school experience when evaluating applicants, allowing Williams, whose background is in finance, to appear among three finalists.

Some board and community members, including Harris, raised concerns about the disconnect, putting a spotlight on perceived lapses in the board’s stewardship of the search. Board members have spent the past two months reexamining those lapses and seeking closer alignment on their priorities in the search.

But they couldn’t reach a unanimous decision. Harris consistently opposed relaxing the minimum requirements, right up to Tuesday’s vote. She declined media interviews after the meeting but said she was serious about quitting the board. If she formally resigns, the Shelby County Commission would begin a process to appoint a replacement.

This is the first time the merged Memphis-Shelby County district has conducted a search since it was formed a decade ago, and the first time since 2008 that Memphis has sought to choose a superintendent through a search rather than internal appointment.

The board is expected to share its new guidelines for the search with Hazard Young, which then could advise the board on a new timeline. The additional qualifications the board agreed upon include:

Tomeka Hart Wigginton, a former board member who has facilitated board discussions about the search, has suggested that by the end of the month, the board create plans for implementing and communicating the changes and continuing community engagement.

Speaking with media after Tuesday’s meeting, Chair Althea Greene said the board should meet with a Hazard Young representative in person to discuss the timeline. But the timeline won’t affect a planned vote for next Tuesday on possible amendments to Williams’ interim superintendent contract, which expires in August.

“We know that we have to have someone to continue to lead us until we get a permanent superintendent … So if it is the will of this board for interim superintendent to continue to lead us, that’s a vote that we will make next week,” Greene said.

The board has yet to complete a required evaluation of Williams’ leadership, which was due May 1.

Laura Testino covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Laura at LTestino@chalkbeat.org. Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news site covering educational change in public schools.

Political parties, as is surely no secret, are constantly looking for converts, and, to that end, normally have what is designated as an “outreach” officer or branch.

The Shelby County Republican Party, which in recent years has lost a shade of its former demographic edge, has one of the best and most effective outreach officials in Naser Fazlullah, a native of Bangladesh and a small business owner who, in the 20 years or so of his American experience, has employed his natural enthusiasm and work ethic to forge ties and friendships across all sorts of boundaries, political and otherwise.

A case in point was an event he conceived and brought to fruition on Saturday at Morris Park on the edge of Downtown. Called “Elephants in the Park,” it had cadres of the local Republican party working side by side with off-duty judges, members of law enforcement, and community activists like Stevie Moore, founder of Freedom From Unnecessary Negatives (FFUN), a renowned anti-violence group — all toiling at food tables handing out meal boxes (fish, spaghetti, fries, coleslaw) to a population of hungry Memphians recruited from three local homeless agencies, an estimated 300 people before the day was over. The food came from both Fazlullah’s own Whitehaven restaurant and from other donors.

Politics, as such, figured not at all. The idea was to make people-to-people connections, for the sake not merely of the beneficiaries but of the servers who worked for the day on their behalf — like John Niven, a veteran GOP activist who commented, “I’ve never done anything that made me feel as good as this did. The homeless basically don’t vote, and those who do probably vote Democratic, but so what?”

• The most common political name right now? That’s an easy one. It’s “Harris.” There’s Lee Harris (county mayor); Sheleah Harris (school board); Michael Harris (Shelby County Democratic Party’s chairman); and Linda Harris (candidate for district attorney general).

And, of course, there’s Kamala Harris (vice president of the United States).

The one who was on display Monday morning at The Hub in East Memphis (to a group of politically astute ladies calling themselves “Voices of Reason”) was Torrey Harris, first-term state representative for House District 90.

State Rep. Harris discussed with a rapt audience the ins and outs of how Democrats struggle to make their influence felt in the supermajority Republican legislature. His auditors were especially interested in — and aggrieved by — the majority’s passage in the last session of a bill outlawing the teaching in the state’s public schools of “critical race theory,” which, as Harris noted, is (a) not taught in the public schools, and (b) is the GOP’s catchphrase for attempts to deal honestly with the nation’s racial history.

Running as a Democrat last year, Harris had defeated former state Representative John DeBerry, whose long-term sympathy with Republican positions caused the denial of his right to run under the Democratic party label.

The defeated DeBerry, who ended up running as an independent, was rewarded by GOP Governor Bill Lee with a well-paid job as gubernatorial advisor, and one of the ex-Democrat’s main functions, Harris explained, is — wait for it — that of liaison with the House’s Democratic members.