Is Orange Mound for Sale?

Orange Mound is one of the most important neighborhoods in Memphis.  Orange Mound was the first neighborhood in Memphis built with the intention of having black residents.  This is in contrast to other black neighborhoods that turned into black neighborhoods due to white flight.  A number of prominent Memphians have their roots in Orange Mound, and Melrose High School continues to have a very active alumni group.  Orange Mound has seen violence and blight, and its schools have struggled.  However, in the face of all of that, The Mound remains, in many ways, a cohesive neighborhood proud of its heritage and engaged in its present.  As a Memphian, I've been pleased to see that the neighborhood has seen some resurgence in recent years.

Orange Mound is a neighborhood that is the focus of a great deal of education reform attention.

Last summer, Stand for Children plopped down a significant portion of its anonymously-donated $154,000 school board election money in Orange Mound.  The goal, depending on how you look at it, was to elect Kevin Woods or to keep Dr. Kenneth Whalum from being elected.  A couple of articles about those election expenditures:  here and here.  It's not looking good for Commissioner Whalum in his lawsuit regarding the election results.  But here's what he said shortly after the election:  "If our children are for sale, I need to know exactly how many votes they are worth," he said in a press conference Monday outside the former election commission offices Downtown, according to the Commercial Appeal in an August 6, 2012 article.

Let's just mention that Commissioner Woods is the same Kevin Woods that the County Commission is trying to protect by re-drawing the lines of the districts, so that the school board district lines would not exactly match up with the County Commission district lines.  If they don't make an exception for him, then Commissioner Woods would be in the same geographic district as Chairman Billy Orgel, and they would eventually have to run against each other if they both wanted to stay on the school board.

The Achievement Advisory Council, a group appointed by the Achievement School District, considered last fall which of the city's schools should be given to which charter operators.  The AAC actually recommended that two Orange Mound schools (Hanley and Cherokee Elementary Schools) be given to Aspire charter schools, a California charter looking to expand nationally.  The ASD declined to go that far and gave Aspire only one school, Hanley Elementary. 

The state closed Hanley Elementary at the end of the school year, but you wouldn't know it if you drove past it.  Trying to avoid the mistakes made by Cornerstone prep, Aspire won't be changing the school colors or the school name, hired a few Hanley teachers, and has been ingratiating itself (to the extent that it can) in the neighborhood.  According to the Commercial Appeal, it paid for a trip to California for community members to visit a school, it hosted a "game night", and planned to provide massages and pampering for parents at coming recruitment events.  So the state gave away the school, and now, as part of its "recruitment process", Aspire hopes that its "investments" in the "community" will yield enrolled students.  Investments like trips to California and massages.

And look at all the money Aspire has to "invest", according to the Commercial Appeal:  "It applied for and received $800,000 in innovation funds this year to cover startup costs."  In addition to: 
"[its] budget is based on receiving $7,797 in state and local funds per student. It will also get up to $300 per child for capital improvements, plus $1,500 for every special education child. It will also receive $300 for every child who qualifies for free or reduced lunches. It estimates 90 percent fit that bill, according to its application to the ASD.  It also anticipates up to $28 million from philanthropists as it builds out its network. In five years, Aspire intends to take over 10 low-performing schools here. Initially, it will serve K-5 students. By 2018, it expects they will be K-8 schools, with approximately 564 students in each."

So what does it cost to buy your way into Orange Mound?  Maybe not as much as you expect to get out of it.  Fair trade?

It will be interesting to see what else Aspire has up its sleeve in terms of its expenditures of philanthropic and California tax dollars, all in the name of gaining more Tennessee tax dollars.  Looks like there's cleared area off to the side of the parking lot.  Can't be a playground - Hanley already has a pretty new one in its courtyard, and Orange Mound is not exactly under-parked.  Wonder if Aspire has another "investment" in mind . . .

What's In a Name?

Back in October 2011, at the very first meeting of the "unified" Shelby County School Board, Commissioner Patrice Robinson started off the festivities with a motion to add an item to the agenda, namely that the name of the Shelby County Board of Education be changed to "Unified Shelby County School Board".  The item got added to the agenda, but the proposal died.

Gosh, so much has happened since then.

Michael Kelley now tells us that the clock is ticking if the Board intends to change its name in advance of next school year.  Apparently, such a change involves things like state legislation, and logos on buildings, cars, and stationery, along with myriad other considerations that only the respective legal and PR teams care anything about.  The subject came up at this past Friday's Transition Advisory Council meeting.

The TAC is made up of various "stakeholders", and chaired by School Board Vice-Chair Teresa Jones.  Also on the TAC:  School Board Commissioners Snowden Carruthers and Freda Williams, Transition Planning Commissioners Daniel Kiel and (Mayor) Mark Luttrell, Sammy Jobe & Keith Williams (heads of the SCEA and MEA, respectively), Parents Sharon Farley and Veronica Collins, and Terence Patterson, Education Program Officer for the Hyde Family Foundations.  The TAC started meeting last October.

Of all the things to be worried about.  And of all the things to be worried about RIGHT NOW.

Just switching all of the MCS logos over to SCS logos - on vehicles, on school id's, on school letterheads - will be a significant expense.  With a district double-the-size, there are just many more things with the MCS logo than with the SCS logo.  I haven't seen this cost as a line item anywhere, but we haven't exactly had a proposed budget yet, either.  This is a cost directly related to the merger, and must be taken into account somewhere.  It probably doesn't need to be done for Day 1, but it probably should be completed by the end of the school year 2013-14.

Converting all of the current logos to some new logo will be even more expensive.  As a matter of financial stewardship, it seems excessive to go through this sort of large scale branding change.  It would be even more excessive to go through this branding process more than once - a likely possibility given the uncertainty around the potential municipal school districts.  Nothing like naming something "unified" right before it gets broken up into pieces.

There's sure to be a political argument about whether "Memphis" should be reflected in the name, whether the new iteration of Shelby County Schools should be reflected in its name, whether it's important to reflect that this is a "unified" school district.  No one has convinced me that this is anything other than a political discussion, with little actual impact on anyone or anything except the Commissioners having the discussion.  Calling the unified district "unified" next year will not make it more difficult for the municipalities to leave the district, it won't make them look bad while they do it, and it won't really reinforce any sense of "unity".

Particularly while this entire region is in such a period of flux, and the future unified-then-to-be-dissected district is so financially strapped, why incur the cost?  And why incur this cost by This version of the School Board when the eventual School Board is likely to be constructed differently, and may have different views on what to call this district, and may very well have a very different district to name?

Maybe it's worth the mental exercise of the discussion, but let's not stake any of our political reputations on how this comes out.  Someone in the district should be working up the costs associated with this - for just converting MCS to SCS, and for converting MCS AND SCS to something else, and for MCS AND SCS again - so that a real discussion can occur.  But even that work-up has a financial cost to it - requiring teams of people to meet (PR, legal, and finance).  This should be a short discussion, Commissioners.

Let it stay Shelby County Schools.  At least for now.  And possibly, hold off on converting the MCS logoed-items to anything else, and just leave them as MCS until things settle down 'round here.  Maybe I'm just a pessimist and this latest round of mediation will take.  I almost typed that with a straight face.  Speaking of straight faces . . .

Commissioner David Reaves unwittingly contributes some humor to the article.  "It might be best to stay with the status quo, said Commissioner David Reaves. 'Really it's a prioritization of what we have to do, day one,' he said. 'We would have to vote to send it to the legislature to create a bill. That's an enormous amount of time. So the question is, if we don't do that this (legislative) term, and we have to go ahead and re-brand with an SCS brand, at least for the first year: What is the cost going to be, versus going ahead and doing it now?'"

You know, because it's SO difficult for Shelby County to get anything passed in the state legislature because it will take SO long.  Just for some people, Commissioner Reaves, just for some people.