SCS decisions will continue to get tougher

It’s relevant to point out that no one forced members of the Shelby County Schools Board to apply for the job.

But one has to appreciate the challenges ahead for an organization that had to cut $103 million from its budget last year and is losing students and the funding that comes with them to the state-managed Achievement School District, charter schools and, most likely with the expected passage of a state tuition voucher plan, private schools.

All that, and the situation is complicated by overhead costs that do not decline in dollar-for-dollar correspondence with the drop in school population.

So it was with an eye quite properly fixed on the bottom line that the board voted last week to close South Side Middle and Lincoln Elementary schools, and move the hundreds of students from both schools to other schools in a district-within-the-district that SCS calls its Innovation Zone.

High school students currently at Woodstock Middle/ High will be moved to Trezevant and Bolton high schools. Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders now at Airways Middle will be moved to Sherwood Middle. About 200 children in the upper grades at Brookmeade Elementary will move to Lucie E. Campbell.

The disruption to families is undeniable. If Memphis had a healthy and growing inner city, with new families moving in every day, it wouldn’t be necessary. The mother who complained that the move her family was facing would limit her ability to respond to an emergency at her child’s new school three miles away because she did not own a car would not have to deal with that inconvenience.

Thereis,ofcourse,atrade-off.Theselatestinagrowing list of school closings move students to larger schools with, in most cases, better facilities and, because of their larger student populations, more curriculum offerings.

Some of the moves leave the board open to criticism because they are precipitated by the decision last fall to end the practice of sharing school buildings with charter schools. This all-or-nothing approach prompted one charter operator, YES Prep, which was scheduled to take over Airways Middle this fall, to suddenly back out of its commitment.

School board members make a persuasive case, however, that eliminating the school-sharing arrangement, which allowed charters to take over a school one or two grades at a time, was making it difficult to find strong teacherswhowerewillingtostepontosuchshakyground.

The board’s tendency to shift schools into the Innovation Zone can be read as a race against ASD takeovers that has nothing to do with what’s best for students and everything to do with protection of the district’s economic vitality. The ASD has taken 7,100 students in the last three years and the $11,000 SCS would get each year for each student. Its enrollment is expected to reach 9,200 next year.

Another interpretation would have SCS engaged in that race for the benefit of students. Early test scores seem to indicate that the iZone may be doing a better job than the ASD at educating kids.

The board is wise to start work on policies and procedures that might create a more orderly process going forward — how it deals with charter schools, including allocating funding for school buildings and repairs, how it engages with the community when school closings are under study, and the like. It wouldn’t hurt to improve long-range forecasts of expected school closings, as well, if that’s at all possible.

As board member Stephanie Love pointed out recently, “Sometimes we have to make tough decisions for our kids.” They won’t get easier any time soon.