Fears of instability plague transition

School transfers at heart of parents’ worries

The Transition Planning Commission writing the plan for public school consolidation resumes its public listening tour Monday, when members hope to reassure parents not to expect large -scale student transfers after the schools are merged.

The instability question is one of the factors driving support in the suburbs for municipal school districts that would allow parents to opt out of the new county system, set to open in the fall of 2013.

The TPC has no official stand on municipal districts. Its answer to the question is cautious and carefully crafted: “The Transitional Planning Commission’s charge as defined by the Norris-todd Bill is to create a plan to merge Memphis City Schools and Shelby County Schools to provide a high quality education for all students within Shelby County.”

It’s difficult to be more reassuring than that because of factors that are not in the control of the TPC, a creature of the Norris-todd legislation, which also lifted the ban on new special and municipal districts in Tennessee. School closings and redistricting that arises from changing housing patterns are management and school board decisions.

“That’s still ahead for the unified board,” said Bartlett mayor Keith Mcdonald, a strong suburban voice on the TPC. “When they merge these systems they have to set the zones. That zone could affect which high school I go to.”

But some parents have expressed fears that go well beyond the fallout from a school closing or shifting school attendance zone

lines. The notion that large groups of students would be shifted from one community to another to some extent permeated last week’s tumultuous Collierville stop on the listening tour.

“Somebody who spoke at Collierville spoke about their (fear of ) kids being bused to Melrose,” said TPC Communication and Community Engagement Committee chair- man Jim Boyd. “We’ve heard that a lot. ... (O)ur commitment is that children will be able to attend schools in their communities. That’s our deep fundamental commitment.”

Questions about whether students will be forcefully bused out of their neighborhoods can be answered with a flat “no,” because neither MCS nor SCS is under courtordered desegregation mandates.

And TPC members are confident that future school boards would not risk ignit- ing the wrath of school patrons with large and illogical transfers. High among the group’s guiding principles is that “We aim to enhance our district by balancing stability with needed change.”

“The real fear is that we’ll take kids in Bartlett and move them down by the river,” TPC chairman Barbara Prescott said. “I think we want to do educationally sound things, and to move kids around is not an educationally sound strategy.” — Michael Kelley:

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