Memphis city leaders call TVA study ‘political,’ not informative

The Tennessee Valley Authority faced a tough crowd Tuesday.

When executives from the federal power provider left the Memphis City Council’s chambers Tuesday morning, Councilman Chase Carlisle, who had just lambasted the company, turned to his colleagues and quipped, “My foot’s sore.”

Carlisle and fellow councilmembers

Jeff Warren, JB Smiley Jr. and Cheyenne Johnson hammered TVA and expressed skepticism that a report on the power provider’s economic impact in the region was anything more than a political maneuver.

TVA paid the Greater Memphis Chamber $75,000 for the report. The report, released last week, claimed that TVA has had a $1 billion impact on the region’s gross domestic product between 2016 to 2020. The report, which was produced last year but just became public, rubbed many members the wrong way.

Memphis Light, Gas and Water, the city-owned utility, is in the midst of deciding whether it should leave TVA. MLGW buys all of its electricity from TVA for about $1 billion a year.

More than 20 private firms have bid on Memphis’ power supply. The process is expected to conclude later this year. MLGW will present preliminary findings next month, though it is unclear how much information will be shared.

The City Council has the final vote on whether Memphis leaves TVA and, from the display Tuesday, it did not look like TVA had many friends on the city’s legislative body.

“Oh my. Look at the timing,” Carlisle said of the impact study. He told TVA executives John Bradley and Mark Yates that they were better served not looking back and trying to demonstrate what the power provider had done in the past and, instead, communicating in writing what they were willing to do for Memphis, which is the company’s largest

situation,” Shawn Page, the chief of academic operations and school support for the district, told board members Tuesday.

MSCS’ attendance rate is about 91.6%, compared to a recent high of 95.1% for the 2017-18 school year, the latest school year compared in the report.

Chronic absenteeism, though, has sustained a more significant impact: At a rate of 28.2%, it is about 8 percentage points higher than the next highest rate of 20.1% in 2018-19.

That means for the current school year, more than 1 in 4 students missed more than 10% of school.

The following student groups had chronic absenteeism rates about the district average:

h Economically disadvantaged students, 35.6%. h Black students, 31.1%. h Students with disabilities, 29.9% For the five academic years compared in the report, the three student groups regularly had rates higher than the district averages.

Chronic absenteeism considers all kinds of absences, whether they are unexcused or excused, such as for a documented illness, and also include student suspensions.

All of this accounts for 61,054 missed days of school, the district report estimates, the second largest figure across the last five years. It wasn’t immediately clear how the sum compared to the 2018-19 year, which had the highest figure, once total student enrollment was accounted for.

Beyond acknowledging the pandemic, district officials didn’t suggest specific reasons for the absences in the report, or explain how or whether the data trends were related to student or family member cases of or exposures to COVID-19.

District-managed schools reported better attendance rates among students than the district’s independently managed charter schools, per the report. The totals include all schools, but when broken out to compare districtmanaged and charter schools, MSCS schools have higher attendance rates and lower chronic absenteeism rates than charter counterparts by a couple percentage points.

The district nearly abandoned suspensions during the 2020-2021 school year, the data shows, when most students were learning virtually and some returned during the final quarter of the school year.

For the 2021-22 school year, suspensions popped back up to 9.7%, a couple tenths of a percentage point higher than the suspension rate the district calculated for the part of the 2019-20 school year students attended until buildings closed in March 2020, a couple months before the last day of school.

Laura Testino covers education and children’s issues for the Commercial Appeal. Reach her at laura.testino@commercialappeal.com or 901512-3763. Find her on Twitter: @Ldtestino

Students in Carol Welch’s kindergarten class at Riverwood Elementary work inside desk partitions on March 1, 2022, as Shelby County Schools held the first day of in-person learning since closing schools the previous March to safeguard staff and students from the COVID-19 pandemic.

PHOTOS BY JOE RONDONE/ THE COMMERCIAL APPEAL Reagan Featherson, 6, right, and Spencer Brice Kimble, 7, work on an art project detailing the four seasons during summer learning academy at Treadwell Elementary School on July 21, 2021.