Signal sees lessons in Shelby exit
Breakaway school leaders’ advice is to control messaging, be realistic about costs
Editor’s note: Chalkbeat is a nonprofit news organization covering education issues across America.
Leaders from a mountain town near Chattanooga spent much of this week learning how to follow in the footsteps of suburban town leaders near Memphis to create their own small school system.
Calling their trip to Shelby County, Tenn., a fact-finding mission, the mayor of Signal Mountain and a small committee of citizens met with leaders from the towns of Arlington, Bartlett, Collierville, Millington and Germantown, all of which just completed their third year of operating their own school systems.
Signal Mountain is in its second year of discussions about a possible pullout from Hamilton County Schools and is home to three of the Hamilton County Schools district’s higher-performing schools. If the town opts to exit, it would do so under the same state law used by Memphis-area suburbs to leave Shelby County Schools in 2014.
The law, which was pushed by the suburban leaders, allows towns with 1,500 or more students to form a district if the majority of its citizens votes in favor of the change. It doesn’t require the approval of the district left behind or consideration of the impact on racial or socioeconomic equity.
For Signal Mountain, the circumstances are somewhat different than for Shelby County in 2014, which followed the 2013 merger of the mostly black and low-income Memphis City Schools with the whiter and more-affluent county school system.
“We don’t have that impetus for change,” Signal Mountain Mayor Chris Howley said Wednesday about the Shelby County merger. “[This exploration] started with a group of parents expressing concern about the way our schools are going.”
The committee will take its findings back to Signal Mountain, just in time for a public meeting next week. A full report of the committee’s findings will be released in the fall.
Chalkbeat sat in on all three days of this week’s discussions. Here are five takeaways:
1. Signal Mountain leaders are asking how — not if — the town should secede.
While they stressed they were on a fact-finding mission to decide whether even to pursue a pullout, much of the exchanges focused on the nuts and bolts of how to take that path.
Committee members were eager to hear what exactly the process was for the Shelby County de-merger and what it looked like to start their own districts — from teacher rights to employee benefits to transportation services.
Committee Chairman John Friedl specifically wanted to know about how to retain teachers should Signal Mountain exit the Hamilton County district. In Shelby County, each municipality kept all teachers who wanted to stay in order to avoid potential lawsuits. Their leaders encouraged Signal Mountain to do the same.
The committee was appointed in January by Signal Mountain’s Town Council and has invested months into figuring out if a new school district is viable. One parent member, Amy Wakim, has crafted a hypothetical budget that Howley said has gotten positive feedback from the Tennessee Department of Education.
While committee members focused on getting into the nitty-gritty of forming Signal Mountain’s own district, Howley stressed that the town is far from heading toward a vote.
“This is a huge, huge decision,” he said. “… The minimum thing that comes out of this is that we can go share what we found with [Hamilton County school leaders].”
2. They heard glowing reviews of Shelby County’s 3-year-old municipal districts.
From academic gains and expanded course offerings to wider community support, the positives of local schools under local control were touted by a parade of municipal leaders.
“Education has become much more personalized,” said Arlington Superintendent Tammy Mason. “And buy-in from the local community has had a direct impact on student achievement.”
“The housing market in Collierville is going nuts,” added James Lewellen, his town’s manager. “The way people look at Collierville has changed. … We’re not doing this just to govern our own schools, but to change the way children are educated in Collierville.”
Other leaders described spikes in population and home prices as a result of the locally controlled school systems.
“This is a pristine example of if you build it, they will come,” said David Pickler, the longtime chairman of the county’s legacy schools who helped to lead the exodus of towns from the new Shelby County Schools.
After the first year of operation, five of six municipal school districts welcomed mostly positive state test scores. Districts in Arlington and Millington also saw their ACT scores go up, although college entrance scores in
Germantown, Collierville and Bartlett stayed stagnant or decreased slightly last year.
Each municipality was represented at this week’s talks by its school superintendent and a town leader such as the mayor or city manager. No one from the Memphis-based urban district was invited.
3. Local control comes with a price tag. Every municipality has raised taxes since the breakaway.
Starting a school district from scratch isn’t a cheap endeavor, municipal leaders acknowledged.
“Every one of the municipalities has raised their taxes … with tremendous support from community because people see dollars going directly into their schools,” Pickler said.
Most of the increases have been for property taxes, but some towns have upped their local sales taxes, too. Bartlett recently approved a 35-cent property tax increase, in part to fund expansion and renovation of Bartlett High School at a projected cost of up to $60 million.
Facilities have proven to be one of the more expensive, and contentious, issues between the municipalities and the district they broke away from. In Shelby County, the facilities followed the students, meaning new districts inherited school buildings in their city limits if a majority of students lived in that city. That meant inheriting some aging buildings with significant maintenance needs. (Shelby County Schools is also dealing with deferred maintenance needs that total about $500 million.)
“We inherited a high
school where the roof had leaked so badly for so long, there was mold growing inside the building,” said David Roper, superintendent of Millington Municipal Schools, the most socioeconomically diverse and cashstrapped municipality. “It wasn’t like we took over sparkling clean buildings … and [their condition] had not sat well with Millington for some time.”
4. Leaders bristled at any suggestion their pullouts are racially motivated.
The breakaway movement has taken a beating this month from researchers at EdBuild, who released a long-awaited national report labeling the breakaways as secessions and characterizing the trend as a new form of school district segregation.
That notion riled leaders from the Shelby County municipalities, who say the 2013 merger left many of their residents concerned their schools would get lost in Tennessee’s largest district.
“It’s not about white or black, rich or poor,” said Pickler. “It’s about a community
saying we want something better and are willing to invest our time, our talent, our energy.”
Lewellen, of Collierville, urged Signal Mountain to record and document every proceeding, in case charges of racism or classism arise.
“People try to rewrite history, and tell you why you did what you did,” Lewellen said. “People say there are underlying motives for it. No there wasn’t. … We wanted to self-govern.”
When the municipalities first announced plans to break off, the newly consolidated Shelby County Schools sued, charging race was the motivation for leaving. A federal judge dismissed the suit and a settlement was negotiated.
Friedl expressed concern a pullout by Signal Mountain would further isolate the community from the rest of Hamilton County, which is poorer and more racially diverse than the mountain.
“Our kids will have a better educational experience if they are exposed to more diversity than they currently are,” Friedl said. “We can’t reach down off the mountain and pull kids up. … We can’t manufacture diversity.”
Shelby County leaders suggested openenrollment policies as a way to avoid the perception of “walling yourselves off.” Any student living in the county can apply to attend a municipal school district free of charge. But there are caps on how many out-of-district students municipalities can take, and those open-enrollment policies could change.
5. Messaging is key.
Concerns about perception and communication strategies reverberated throughout the meetings, but a twominute litany of advice from Lewellen especially perked the ears of Signal Mountain leaders.
“Control your message,” he told them. “And get the h––– off social media. Social media will kill you. If you lose your message, it will kill you.”
Lewellen warned the message can get lost if people who aren’t involved in the process begin to speak on behalf of your town.
“We had to get dirty and say, ‘You don’t speak for us; shut up. That’s not our motives or what we’re trying to accomplish,’” Lewellen recalled.
When Collierville elected its first school board, Lewellen hired consultants to coach members about the importance of messaging and how to speak with the news media. He called it “the best thing [we’ve] ever done.”
“We talked about the importance of acting presidential, not acting like a dysfunctional bunch of spoiled children. Show some leadership because the world’s watching right now. When you go in a public meeting, sit up straight, act presidential. Don’t fight it out in a public meeting; fight it out elsewhere. Be good leaders in this.”
Reporters Laura Faith Kebede and Helen Carefoot contributed to this story.