Gardenhire: Hold schools ‘accountable’ for poor performance
State says local schools haven’t improved enough
NASHVILLE — Fresh off his re-election victory Tuesday, state Sen. Todd Gardenhire, R-Chattanooga, said he’s a second-term Tennessee lawmaker with a local mission.
“I’m going to encourage our local delegation to hold the Hamilton County school system accountable for what they have not done in educating our children,” said Gardenhire, a vice chairman of the Senate Education Committee. “I’m going to inject myself into the local system as much as I possibly can.”
The outspoken senator’s comments came after his 55.87 percent to 44.13 percent victory in his Senate District 10 race with Democrat Khristy Wilkinson of Chattanooga.
District 10 includes portions of Hamilton County, including the city of Chattanooga, as well as heavily Republican rural parts of nearby Bradley County.
Unofficial final results on the Tennessee secretary of state’s website show Gardenhire narrowly lost Hamilton, his home county, with Wilkinson winning 28,505 votes, or 50.97 percent, to Gardenhire’s 27,422 votes, or 49.03 percent.
But he dominated Bradley County with a whopping 11,855 votes, or 82.5 percent, to Wilkinson’s 2,514 votes, or 17.5 percent, unofficial tallies show.
The retired financial adviser said that, besides being a top target of Democrats, he was the “No. 1 target by a lot of hospital groups” over his two votes against Republican Gov. Bill Haslam’s failed Insure Tennessee Medicaid expansion proposal in 2015.
Tuesday’s vote “vindicated me in overcoming all those obstacles,” Gardenhire said.
Gardenhire and local Republican lawmakers are on the county school system’s back over its poor performance. In September, he and the six other Hamilton County legislators, among them a Democrat, held a “mini-summit” on the state of county schools.
State education Commissioner Candice McQueen, an appointee of Gov. Bill Haslam, told the group that Hamilton County’s five priority schools had received $13 million in school improvement grants since 2013 but are “not seeing the improvements we have seen with our other priority schools.”