Education Week: Memphis-Shelby Schools Merge Amid Uncertainty

While plans are forging ahead this summer for joining Memphis' 140,000-student school system with the surrounding suburban district, school officials also have to take into account the possibility that the unification might be temporary.

The Memphis and Shelby County, Tenn., districts officially merged July 1. For one year at least, the unified district will be the nation's 14th largest, and the planning for the merger has involved board members and district leaders from both legacy systems.

The merger stemmed from the city schools' desire to be more financially stable.

"The merger gave us the opportunity to identify inefficiencies. Our community had to come together to improve and invest in the schools," said Kenya Bradshaw, a fellow with the Minneapolis-based Policy Innovators in Education Network, who served on a transition planning committee for the new district.

However, several municipalities in the surrounding county will vote next month to determine whether new school districts will be carved out of the newly unified system starting in 2014-15. Differing racial demographics have also emerged as an issue.

Although district officials say the system is ready to open schools' doors in August, the possibility of those further changes has affected the planning, said Daniel Kiel, a law professor at the University of Memphis who also served on the transition planning committee.

"There's so much uncertainty about whether the new municipal districts are going to exist," he said.

Read the full article here.

Atlantic: In Memphis Classrooms, the Ghost of Segregation Lingers

Samantha Crawford, an 18-year-old high-school senior, doesn't like to use the word "ghetto" to describe her neighborhood in the center of Memphis, Tennessee, but she can't think of a better one. In Binghampton, people drink and hang out. They are transient, moving from apartment to apartment and job to job. Many don't work at all. Samantha speculates that few have finished college, or even high school.

In the past two years, though, Samantha has begun to look at her neighborhood as an inspiration. "It's not about where I stay, or wherever I come from, but what I'm going to make of it," she says.

Samantha once earned only Bs and Cs. Now, she makes straight As. She had dreamed of college, but wasn't sure how she'd get there. Now, she's feeling overwhelmed by the choices available to her. In the past few months, she received five college acceptance letters, along with a scholarship to a local community college.

Read the full article from the Atlantic here.

NY Times: Merger of Memphis and County School Districts Revives Race and Class Challenges

When thousands of white students abandoned the Memphis schools 38 years ago rather than attend classes with blacks under a desegregation plan fueled by busing, Joseph A. Clayton went with them. He quit his job as a public school principal to head an all-white private school and later won election to the board of the mostly white suburban district next door.

Now, as the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district is being dissolved into the majority-white Shelby County schools, Mr. Clayton is on the new combined 23-member school board overseeing the marriage. And he warns that the pattern of white flight could repeat itself, with the suburban towns trying to secede and start their own districts.

“There’s the same element of fear,” said Mr. Clayton, 79. “In the 1970s, it was a physical, personal fear. Today the fear is about the academic decline of the Shelby schools.”

“As far as racial trust goes,” Mr. Clayton, who is white, added, “I don’t think we’ve improved much since the 1970s.”

Read the full article here.

NY Times: Memphis Votes for County to Run Schools

Memphis residents voted Tuesday to transfer the administration of the city’s schools to the county, supporting earlier moves by city officials and effectively putting an end to the city school system.

The referendum is the first time that voters have weighed in on the fate of the schools, a racially and politically charged issue that has fueled months of debate and political brinkmanship and pitted the city against its suburbs and many state lawmakers.

Voters decided roughly two-to-one that the 103,000 students in the city’s schools should join the 47,000 suburban students in one countywide system. State law limited the vote to city residents.
Still, the issue remains in uncertain legal territory, subject to numerous lawsuits. In the short term, it is even unclear just who will be in charge of city schools.

“We are on a path to a merged school system,” said Daniel Kiel, a law professor at the University of Memphis who specializes in education law. “How we get there, we don’t know.”

For years, the Memphis and suburban Shelby County school systems operated semiautonomously but were paid for collectively. Taxes were drawn from everyone in the county and divided between the two systems based on attendance. City schools were additionally financed by revenues from a city-only tax.

But residents of the more affluent suburbs have harbored a goal of forming a so-called special district, which would permanently freeze the boundaries of the suburban-controlled school district, preventing any merger or urban encroachment.

City residents were deeply concerned about the financial implications of such a move. If Memphis, a poor city, were forced to pay for its schools without countywide support, taxes in the city would skyrocket and schools could face financial difficulties.

Advocates of a suburban district say they would have continued to pay taxes toward all schools even with a special district, but that assurance has been received by city residents with skepticism.
Such special districts, which proliferated in the years after school desegregation, were declared illegal in 1982. But Republican domination in the state elections in November, fueled in part by Republican strongholds in the suburban areas, made it much more likely that special districts would be allowed again.

So in December, the city school board took the drastic step of voting to dissolve itself and leave its schools in the county’s hands. The City Council later voted to dissolve the city school board. Tuesday’s referendum was seen by many as the final step.

But suburban residents were outraged, seeing the maneuver as a hostile takeover by a much larger, poorer and more complicated school district. Never in the state’s history, they pointed out, has a larger district — in this case, more than twice as large — dissolved into a smaller one.

 Last month, Republican state lawmakers passed a law mandating a two-and-a-half-year transition period for the merger. The law would also lift the prohibition on special districts in Shelby County at the end of that period. Smaller towns in the suburbs have already begun planning to create autonomous school districts of their own.

As far as the state is concerned, that law is now governing the transition. But the county commission has its own plan, and there are other debates over exactly who sits on a transition committee. And lawsuits are coming almost by the week, putting the whole process into what Professor Kiel calls “a legal black hole.”

NY Times version available here.