Tag: Teresa Jones

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Politics Politics Feature

Modernizing the Vote; Bogus Ballots; and a Judgeship Kerfuffle

Shelby County should be able to hold elections with paper-trail capabilities by August 2020. Or so opined County Election Administrator Linda Phillips last week. In a pre-election speech to a luncheon of the Kiwanis Club of Memphis at the University Club, Phillips said the county is in the process of acquiring equipment that would make possible a process combining electronic scanning with paper trail records.

Phillips said, however, that there would be disadvantages to any return to voting by paper ballot alone, a course advocated in some quarters. The chief problem, she said, would be the high rate of voter error. As an example, she said that “4 to 5 percent” of absentee ballots, which are executed on paper, contain some kind of error. “And how many elections can you recall in which the margin of victory was 5 percent or less?”

The administrator said one of the biggest challenges faced by her office is that “we don’t have enough full-time employees.” Shelby County has 18 full-time employees but needs at least 26, she said, pointing out that Davidson County (Nashville) has 29 employees to service a voting population two-thirds the size of that of Memphis. She plans to transition her office away from what she considers its present over-reliance on temporary workers. 

Jackson Baker

Congressman Steve Cohen ( r) with Council endorsee Erika Sugarmon

Another need is more pollworkers, she said. Shelby County employs 1,800 pollworkers at present, but their average age is 70-something, and “each year we lose more of them.”

Asked about the efficacy of Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), also called Ranked Choice Voting (RCV), Phillips said the county has the capability to use the method, in which voters specify their ballot choices in order of preference, so that resampling of the votes can designate a majority winner without need for a runoff.

“The biggest problem is that the city council has not given us guidelines,” she said. Shelby County voters have twice approved the process via referendum vote, and her office was prepared to use RCV in the current election, but a council majority, in tandem with the state election coordinator’s office, has by one means or another managed to forestall use of the method so far.

At some point in the future, technological advances such as facial recognition could be employed to enable voter check-ins, Phillips said. “That’s probably several decades away. That’s not because the technology isn’t there, but because it takes the legislature a long time to embrace change. Some day we’ll have it.”

• Ballot Battles (cont’d): It wouldn’t be a local election without at least one sample-ballot kerfuffle. And, sure enough, alarms have been raised, especially in local Democratic circles about a ballot being mailed to households and passed out at early-voting polls bearing the imprimatur of the “Greater Memphis Democratic Club,” a shell organization that apparently exists only to turn out sample ballots at election time.

Jackson Baker

Election Administrator Linda Phillips

The ballot in question, whose chief proprietor is entrepreneur Greg Grant, is one of several such ballots that appear at election time, and it is no secret that many, if not all, of the endorsees for office listed on them paid good money to get there.

City Council candidate John Marek, who first called public attention to the ballot last week, says, in fact, that he himself was solicited to purchase a place on the ballot and declined.

Despite being designated as being under “Democratic” auspices, the ballot features several candidates with known or suspected Republican identities — including council candidates Chase Carlisle, Ford Canale, and Worth Morgan, the latter, an incumbent, being Marek’s opponent.

Grant’s sample ballot also pictures several of the favored candidates with facsimiles of the city of Memphis official logo on their mugshots — a possible violation of city and state laws, Marek says.

Along with several pay-for-play ballots in circulation, there are also, as was noted in this space last week, various not-for-profit sample ballots in distribution locally, including a familiar one published online by Paula Casey, Jocelyn Wurzburg, and Dottie Jones (successor in that regard to her late mother, Happy Jones).

And 9th District U.S. Representative Steve Cohen, in a manner somewhat reminiscent of sample ballots put out in years past by congressional predecessor Harold Ford Sr., is a party to one —  “The Most Qualified Democrats for Change” voters’ guide — expressing his preferences and those of County Commissioner Van Turner and former local party chair David Cocke, all bona fide Democrats. Cohen has in the past backed litigation against misappropriation of the name “Democratic” by purveyors of the pay-for-play ballots.

• As noted this week in the “Politics Beat Blog” at memphisflyer.com, sparks flew during a weekend forum featuring candidates for the two contested races for municipal judge.

Unexpectedly, incumbent Division Three Judge Jayne Chandler charged her opponent, Magistrate David Pool, with “dishonesty” in alleging that she was “unfair” in her conduct of her court, and that that was a reason for his several endorsements by various organizations. Pool denied making any such insinuations.

Chandler also denied rumors that she had a hand in making sure that her Division One counterpart, Judge Teresa Jones, had an opponent — lawyer LaTrena Davis-Ingram. Judge Jones, for her part, launched an attack on Davis-Ingram, who had, she said, resided, worked, and voted in Collierville right up to the point of declaring her candidacy for the Memphis judgeship. Davis-Ingram did not directly respond to the charge.

The forum fireworks seemed to  constitute a confirmation of sorts that bad feelings persist between Jones and Chandler. The third municipal Judge, Tarik Sugarmon in Division 2, is unopposed.

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Politics Politics Feature

Short-changing the Schools

CREDIT: Jackson Baker

At one point in the Shelby County Commission’s crash session on aspects of school financing on Monday, the subject of charter schools came up amid a discussion of whether closing schools actually saved taxpayer money. 

Shelby County Schools (SCS) Chair Teresa Jones noted wanly that, while her board can decide on school closures for financial reasons — and has done so frequently — it has no such authority over charter schools, regarding which the Tennessee Board of Education is now the principal overseer, thanks to actions of the Tennessee General Assembly.

That part of the conversation was a reminder of the degree to which local control of public school education has succumbed to the dictates of state government, like so much else that used to be the prerogative of local jurisdictions — control of firearms in municipal parks, for example, or the right to impose wage and anti-discrimination standards in the public sphere.

But nowhere has what many see as the quashing of local choices been more pronounced than in the administration of public education. One of the premises of SCS Superintendent Dorsey Hopson‘s recent request of the county commission for an additional $14.9 million funding had to do with the interruptions and diversions in state outlays caused by the hodge-podge of overlapping of school types and districts that — for better or for worse — have transformed the landscape of local education. 

It may sound progressive and civic-minded when one state school official, such as Candice McQueen, the recently named Tennessee Commissioner of Education, speaks in Memphis on Monday about a new abundance of “choices,” and it may sound decisive when another, Chris Barbic, head of the state’s Achievement School District, boasts that his efforts to revamp student results in the “failing” schools he administers (a majority of which are in Memphis) are not  answerable to any potentially troublesome school board. But the reality in both cases is that local control of education, once a given, has been pre-empted.

The aforementioned session held on Monday by the county commission, in tandem with SCS officials, was largely about the dislocations caused by this shift in responsibility, and a key component of that discussion was the allegation that Nashville has been consistently short-changing the several school districts of Shelby County of the funding levels required by the state’s own Basic Education Program (BEP).

The problem is not Shelby County’s alone. Back in March, the Hamilton County (Chattanooga) Board of Education, after meeting in the state capital with representatives of Tennessee’s other major urban school districts, including SCS, filed suit against the state in Nashville Chancery Court, contending that the state’s underfunding of BEP-ordained levels amounts to the better part of a billion dollars and “shifts the cost of education to local boards of education, schools, teachers, and students, resulting in substantially unequal educational opportunities across the state.”

That, in a nutshell, is the issue that confronts SCS and the county’s six municipal school districts, as well as Shelby County government, which has responsibility for making up the deficits in school funding.

Whatever the result of this legal action, the ever-aggrandizing state educational apparatus, the governor’s office, and the General Assembly have been put on notice.

 

· More from that crash session on Monday: Public school education in Shelby County may never again become the political football it was during the years of merger/de-merger controversy, but it’s begun to move in that direction again, for purely budgetary reasons.

Not quite two weeks after a request for additional funding by SCS Chief Hopson that occasioned a reaction from Shelby County Commission members that several observers described as a “love-fest,” the thrill is definitely gone, and the $14.9 million add-on money sought by Hopson now looks like so much pie in the sky — in a very overcast sky, at that.

The meeting was called by commission budget Chair Heidi Shafer to re-examine the issue of school funding in general (and funding in relation to three initialized considerations — BEP, OPEBs, and MOE — in particular). Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell — who attended the meeting and, along with his CAO, Harvey Kennedy, and CFO, Mike Swift, intervened at key moments — laid it on the line, bluntly: “We cannot afford $18 million [the amount of Hopson’s request, plus an additional amount that would be routed by average-daily-attendance (ADA) formula to the county’s municipal schools].”

Luttrell topped that by adding, as an aside to SCS representatives on hand, “You might try looking at lay-offs.”

One of the issues, clearly, is the mayor’s concern that his proposed 2015-2016 budget of $1.18 billion, which must be acted on by the commission before the fiscal-year deadline of July 1st has been squeezed down to a level that avoids the need for a tax increase this year — although subsequent teasing by various county hands has revealed a de facto surplus of $6 million that is theoretically available for ad hoc needs.

That yields another issue, one alluded to even at the aforementioned love-fest of May 6th — the fact that SCS officials have chosen not to tap that $178 million fund balance of theirs to cover the projects they want paid for. 

School officials have accounted for this reluctance in various ways — some roundabout, some not, some (in defense of maintaining a healthy reserve) even common-sensical — but commission members seem much less inclined to indulge SCS on the point than they were two weeks ago.

Commissioner David Reaves, a former SCS board member himself, put it straightforwardly to the various representatives of SCS — CFO Alicia Lindsey and members Teresa Jones (chair), Kevin Woods (vice chair), and Chris Caldwell (SCS budget chair) — who spent the better part of three hours fielding inquiries from the commission.

Said Reaves: “The reality is, how do you justify having that much money in a savings acccount and asking for $18 million? It’s tough to justify.”

Commissioner Walter Bailey, arguably the most lenient commission member on budgeting for schools, asked the SCS reps a series of questions designed to establish the point that they had already cut their ambitions for next year’s budget to the bone. But he got very little backup from other commission members, even the most SCS-friendly among them.

Clearly, the likelihood is that SCS will be forced to scale back its monetary request — much of which is being sought to keep up funding for various educational strategies that were formerly taken care of by expired or expiring grants from the Gates Foundation and the Race to the Top federal competition won by Tennessee.

The fate of SCS’ fund request was really just a sideshow to the meeting’s main purpose — which was to look critically at the county’s school-funding predicament vis-à-vis the aforementioned alphabetized issues: the BEP; OPEBs (Other Post-Employment Benefits), meaning the benefits contractually owed to retirees in addition to pensions; and MOE (maintenance-of-effort funding), the educational-spending minimums prohibited by the state from being reduced for any reason other than drops in student numbers.

It was on the matter of OPEBs that Luttrell had become most didactic, pointing out that, while county government had seen the writing on the wall regarding the escalating unaffordability of such costs, “others had not,” and he specified SCS as a major procrastinator. Memphis, too, had belatedly begun to reduce OPEB costs, almost to the vanishing point, and he suggested SCS did the same.

County Financial Officer Swift turned the screw a little tighter, noting that at current levels of obligation, OPEB expenses would be costing SCS something like $94 million annually — a sum which, he said with classic understatement, did not seem “feasible.”

The status of MOE obligations on Shelby County government at large was treated as a related phenomenon, but any hopes of getting to the bottom of it were fairly well scotched by a consensus view of the administration and county attorneys that MOE amount for a given jurisdiction were predicated on the third year of a scheduled spending cycle — the latest of these beginning with the de-merger brought about by the creation of six suburban school districts.  

The commission will give all these matters another go-round on Wednesday, its regular committee day.

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News News Blog

Teachers Express Anger Over Compensation Plan

So many teachers showed up to the Shelby County Schools (SCS) board meeting Tuesday night to protest a proposed performance-based compensation plan that attendees were being asked to watch the meeting on TVs in a separate area of the administration building.

During a nearly hour-long public comment period in a standing-only room, teacher after teacher expressed outrage at the new plan, which provides for annual raises based on performance. The issue for many teachers is that performance is determined by their Teacher Effectiveness Measure (TEM) score, which ranks from level one (lowest) to level five (highest). Those with level one and two scores will not receive raises, but teachers with level three scores will get an $800 raise. Teachers with level four will receive $1,000, and level five teachers will get $1,200.

teacher_pay.jpg

The TEM scores are partially determined by student surveys and a school’s overall standing, and some teachers don’t think those factors should judge their individual performances.

“I’ve had no cost of living adjustment in four years, and my health insurance has quadrupled in 10 years,” said Ethan Randall, a teacher a Kingsbury High School. “And the current TEM process is entirely subjective.”

As teachers took turns at the podium, opponents of the compensation plan held up signs and cheered. But when a handful of teachers expressed support for the new plan, the opposing teachers in the crowd booed, leading SCS Board Chair Teresa Jones to chide them. She asked security to remove anyone who interrupted the speakers “by any means necessary.”

One of those supporters was Becky Taylor, a teacher at Idlewild. She called the compensation plan equitable and cited the fact that Memphis teachers make higher salaries than teachers in Nashville.

“In most professions, performance-based pay seems rational,” Taylor said.

After the public comment period, Superintendent Dorsey Hopson defended the compensation plan, and he claimed that many of the plan’s opponents were spreading misinformation.

“When we look at overall performance of this district, we have got to do something different,” Hopson said. “We have got to drastically improve achievement.”

Hopson said he’d heard some teachers complain that SCS could only afford to fund the new plan if the number of level five teachers was lowered. But he said that wasn’t true. He said 80 percent of SCS’ teachers were currently at levels four and five, and the new system was based on those numbers.

“It is also absolutely false that there’s a plan to rate teachers low,” Hopson said. “We want teachers to be evaluated fairly.”

Board member Kevin Woods told the teachers in the room that the board is listening to their concerns with the new plan, and he said he’d like to see the board develop a more comprehensive approach to evaluating teacher performance. But he agreed with Hopson that something has to be done to improve overall achievement.

“I heard one teacher say that Memphis was the highest paid district in the state, but we also need to be the highest performing district,” Woods said.