Citizens offer Collierville leaders suggestions
Every community, consultant Ed Colvin told the Collierville Board of Mayor and Aldermen on Wednesday, is one incident away from appearing on CNN.
“And it has nothing to do with your leadership,” Colvin said. “Now the operative word is Starbucks.”
In fact, Collierville had its incident last August when a 13-year-old and a 14year-old wrote racial slurs on the vehicle of an African-American pastor from Memphis who was at the Collierville High School gym to play basketball.
The juveniles were arrested and the town leaders immediately met with the pastor to offer an official apology.
Two days later, Colvin said, they called him, a consultant with an extensive resume on diversity and inclusion training.
On Wednesday, Colvin presented the board with 20 recommendations collected after convening for weeks with a nine-member focus group that represented every race, ethnic group, socieconomic level and religion that makes up Collierville’s citizenry.
“They got here early, they stayed late. They had no problem talking. And they had a legitimate concern for the community,” Colvin said. “And I’ve been doing this so long that I can sorta tell when you’re not being straight. And it went well. I was impressed.”
The list for town government and the school system hit on religion, the distribution of resources and the need for more diversity and inclusion training.
“Diversity means you’ve invited me to the dance. Inclusion means I’m allowed to dance with anybody in there that I want to,” Colvin said. “We’ve got the first part of it right. We’ve got ‘one,’ whatever that ‘one’ is. But are they sharing ideas? Are they participating? Are they contributing?”
The focus group recommended that the school system acknowledge all religious holidays and that there be more training for all of the district’s staff.
They want more diversity in the town’s social media sites and the periodicals published by the town.
They suggested that for town government all holidays be celebrated equally and that there be a diversity/inclusion/ tolerance survey for the citizens. They also wanted more policing for safety and security and less traffic ticketing.
Members recommended an end to the preferential treatment given to the town’s north side over the south side, which is defined either by Poplar Avenue or the railroad tracks south of Town Square Park.
The group asked for either no prayer at town board meetings, school board meetings and athletic events or that officials include all religious prayers.
And they suggested more diversity on the town’s boards and commissions, diversity in town hiring and the creation of a council so they can continue to work toward these goals.
It is the responsibility of leadership to be authentic, stay engaged with “all” of its communities and to strengthen the lines of communication, Colvin said.
“Collierville is a corporation. You are the CEOs and the managing directors. So if people don’t trust the people who run this place, you’ve got a problem,” he said.
Colvin also praised the town’s leadership for how it handled last summer’s vandalism.
“It’s hard to catch a horse when it’s already out of the barn,” he said.
Colvin says he has the luxury of only taking on work he believes in and that it was obvious to him that Collierville is doing the right thing for the right reasons.
Board members had questions, but Colvin wasn’t there to provide all the answers.
“Where do we go from here?” said Mayor Stan Joyner.
“That’s the $64,000 question,” Colvin said.
Some of the solutions won’t cost any money, noted Alderwoman Maureen Fraser.
The town can easily move some town events to Suggs Park on the town’s south side, Fraser said.
Or it’s as simple as where to plant the azaleas.
The town has a “little bit of money” to plant azaleas in the medians and it was suggested that the parks department start planting on Wolf River Boulevard, said Alderman Billy Patton.
“No. Let’s stop doing that. Let’s start starting at the south side of Collierville and work forward,” Patton said. “We always know we’ll run out of money eventually. Let’s run out of money on the north side of Collierville instead of always running out of money on the south side of Collierville.”
The group also asked that playing fields for international sports, like cricket, be provided and it was suggested that they could easily be added at Hinton Park, on the south side.
But, Fraser said, a large number of cricket players live on the town’s north side.
“How do we get everybody in Collierville to be sales people for Collierville and to get away from the north against the south?” she said.
They won’t satisfy everybody, Colvin said.
“My father had what they call a $100 rule. You can line 20 people up and give everybody in that line a $50 bill. And I’ll be doggone if one of them is going to be upset because it wasn’t a hundred,” he said. “You won’t be pleasing everybody. Number one, are we doing the right thing? And once we determine we’re doing the right thing, we move from there.”
Ed Colvin