Main Street Journal: Feature Article: The Battle: The Shelby County Schools System is Still in the Fight for Special School Districts

The following article is taken from the February 2009 issue of the Main Street Journal. Click “Subscribe Online” above to start your subscription.

The Battle: The Shelby County Schools System is Still in the Fight for Special School Districts
By: Michael Roy Hollihan

There is bad news and good news about the Shelby County school system’s drive for a special school district for non-city areas of the county. The bad news comes from Nashville. Republicans took control of the House and Senate and were expected to champion a special school district bill. However, over recent weeks the Republicans have lost their footing as Republican legislators capitulate. It appears now that any special school district bill will have lower priority than expected.

There have also been changes in the politics of Shelby County: a new City Council with a surprising willingness to shake things up, and a pair of mayors more closely wedded to consolidation than ever before.

The good news is that supporters remain as unflagging and determined as ever. Much of the substance of their arguments remains intact and they have new evidence to back up some claims they’ve made. If the Tennessee House situation is resolved in the Republicans’ favor, then the County is in a good position to move ahead.

The Main Street Journal last reported on special school districts in our November 2005 issue. State Senator Mark Norris was poised to introduce a bill to stay the State’s ban against SSDs. The ban was put into law in the wake of a proliferation of these districts following school desegregation and integration in the Sixties. Since then, most SSDs have been eliminated or merged into single consolidated County or metropolitan entities. Except Memphis.

In a recent interview, Shelby County school board Chairman David Pickler says, “We thought we had a chance at great success. The Senate voted 33 to nothing and the House K-12 Education Subcommittee came within one vote of getting through. Despite a unanimous agreement, at literally the eleventh hour, with the combined efforts of Shelby County Mayor AC Wharton and the leadership of the Memphis City Schools, they chose to renege on that and the bill died.”

“Mayor Wharton was instrumental in killing the special school district bill four years ago,” he continues. ‘We thought we had it passed. That was a major setback for us. Wharton had publicly expressed support for both school systems and what we had agreed to.”

And then came the chaotic political season from the 2007 mayoral election until today. For the past eighteen months, events have seesawed in every direction, leaving everyone wondering what happens next.

Following Mayor Willie Herenton’s record-breaking re-election to a fifth term, Shelby County mayor AC Wharton shifted from being a close collaborator of Mayor Herenton to setting himself up as the heir apparent. The pair makes it clear that they together are one team marching the City and County into a consolidated future. What Herenton is able to start in his last term will be picked up and carried forward by Wharton in his first term. Under that vision, no Shelby County SSD is needed and so no planning or action in that direction is happening.

Whatever accord was building between the City Council and County Commission was also battered when the City Council decided to withhold $66 million in funding that it had traditionally given to the County to fund education. (Interestingly, Pickler says he doesn’t know when or why this was started. Funding education is, by law, the County’s job.) Suddenly, the County had a major gap to fill. The TN Department of Education threatened to strip around $400 million dollars from the City schools if the Council didn’t rescind its decision. The matter went to the courts, where it is still awaiting adjudication. No one is sure of the outcome and so planning is out of the question.

“Over the course of the last three or four years, we’ve been trying to find some way to bridge the gap. Over the course of the last several months, we’ve been engaging in very significant dialog with Memphis City Schools: whether we can come to some sort of agreement over single source funding that might create the opportunity for MCS to get what they are looking for — which is greater stability for funding sources, and provide Shelby County what we’ve been looking for — the autonomy and independence to preserve the legacy of our system.”

The upshot of these machinations? “The Memphis City School board is very interested in transferring its tax burden to the County,” says Pickler.

But the fracas in Nashville has thrown everything into disarray. “We were very hopeful with what we thought was going to be a Republican majority that we’d see a sea-change in the leadership and structure of the Education Committee and the K-12 Subcommittee that we thought would also facilitate this. But all of that obviously changed.”

The arguments for a separate district for non-municipal Shelby County enumerated in 2005 haven’t changed. But Pickler can cite real incidents since then to back up his position.

Pickler gives two good examples of why the County needs the stability and foresight planning an SSD would require. He first brings up the Bridgewater area, south of I-240 and west of Germantown Parkway, with two schools: Dexter Elementary and Middle. The City announced plans to annex Bridgewater some years ago and went through two of the three votes needed to complete the annexation. But on the eve of the third vote, developers with property in Bridgewater asked the City to wait. They wanted to be able to advertise the lots as having Shelby County tax rates and being part of Shelby County schools, so they could maximise the likelihood of a sale. There hasn’t been a third vote yet on Bridgewater.

The County school system had begun planning to transfer those schools over and then had to shelve them for an unknown amount of time.

He also points to Countrywood, and Chimneyrock Elementary, where the City did annex them five years ago. But the City school system wasn’t ready for the new bulge of students. They needed to build a new middle school for the purposes of keeping class sizes in the area small. They asked the County to keep the school for a few years while they built the new middle school. The County planned and budgeted for that. But then the City decided, even though the money was alloted, not to build that school and asked the County, again, to keep the school a while longer.

The County wasn’t prepared. They would have to buy at least 6 portable classrooms and buy more buses, hire more drivers, etc. It would cost an additional $1 million per year in operating costs they weren’t prepared for.

Most importantly, what an SSD would do is put the County on an equal footing with the City school district. Rather than a City Council that unilaterally acts — either to annex or to delay already approved annexations as shown above and leave both school districts to struggle — the SSD would give Shelby schools a formal, negotiated framework with safeguards.

“What we don’t know is when the city of Memphis will choose to annex any properties. We don’t know that if in fact they were to annex a piece of property in the interim, would the school that would be servicing the children be annexed?”

“Neither Memphis nor Shelby county schools are involved in any meaningful way in the decision of the Memphis city council when they make determination about annexation. Both boards get thrown into a crisis management mindset that they’ve got to find a way to provide education for their children when the city chooses to annex an area.”

What he hopes is that an SSD would demand action. “Perhaps establish a transition plan for how we would logically move forward from where we are now to where we are eventually going to be that would incorporate the appropriate infrastructure in place to serve children. And do it in the most cost-effective and operationally efficient manner.”

Pickler is sanguine. “We’re dealing with decades of deep-seated and broadly based mistrust and distrust between the two boards. We’ve had situations in the past where relations have been quite acrimonious. And quite frankly because both districts are, based on any statistical measure, underfunded — Memphis and Shelby County schools fall well below the state average in terms of per-pupil spending — when you have two districts that are underfunded and given the challenge of trying to educate children and dealing with reduced resources, then it makes you very competitive. That created some acrimony.”

“There has been a sense that if, in fact, Shelby County schools were able to gain SSD status we would be able to thrive academically and financially while the city schools withered and died. I don’t think there’s any logical rationale behind that thought process, but that’s definitely some of the feeling that’s been expressed to us.”

Everything may be for naught, though. The day before the interview, the plans that Republicans in the House had been making since the November elections were tossed out the window by the surprise election of Kent Williams, an East Tennessee Republican, with the unanimous support of Democrats and Speaker Jimmy Naifeh. Suddenly, Jason Mumpower, who had garnered the votes and support he expected to take him into the Speakership, and all the plans he and the Republican caucus had made were moot. No one can say what’s going to happen next and the House is in recess until early February.

“We had a presentation I made along with [Memphis City school board president] Tomeka Hart in a meeting about two weeks ago…. Then we had an official presentation to the entire legislative delegation last Friday at the University of Memphis. Until these legislators know their committee assignments, we’ll be dealing with a rapidly changing environment in Nashville. We’re certainly not being passive and sitting back waiting; we’re being pro-active. But the individuals we thought were going to be identified as the committee chairs and the legislative leaders, that landscape has changed radically.”

And so, Shelby County’s best laid plans … may not mean anything. “We have a fairly extensive legislative agenda, that incorporates a number of different items relating to funding, student discipline, student assignments, health and safety. We’re hoping to develop a legislative package that would incorporate some form of the single source funding package if we can negotiate that with the MCS.”

“At this point, we’re not necessarily at Square One, but we’re having to wait to see how all the committee chairmanships are going to fall out.” Where he had expected a sympathetic Republican majority, he now faces an unknowable future whose shape he can’t even begin to see.

“Contingency plans are being made even as we speak,” he says.

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