Gates gives break to SCS

Extra year to spend $11M from 2009 gift

Shelby County Schools has received a one-year extension from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, giving the cash-strapped district more time to use the roughly $11 million left in a gift awarded beginning in 2009 to bolster teacher quality efforts.

The Gates money — a pledge of up to $90 million over seven years — was to be spent by the district by June 30 under the initial terms of the award. With the extension granted last week, the district can stretch the remaining dollars until mid-2017.

That’s good news for Tennessee’s largest school system as it embarks on a particularly painful budget season that has the superintendent and his staff struggling to address a projected deficit of $86 million next school year.

The extension will ensure that the district’s Gates-funded work to overhaul the way it hires, trains and supports teachers and principals will not be sacrificed as the

district tries to balance its $950 million budget for 2016-17.

“This news couldn’t have come at a better time,” Superintendent Dorsey Hopson said in a statement Tuesday. “This funding won’t fill our budget gap, but it will allow us to invest more in our teachers and school leaders.”

Without the investment, school officials said the district would not have been able to supply teachers and principals with professional development and coaching support next school year.

The grant is strictly earmarked for improving teacher and principal quality, and will be used to coach teachers and principals and build a student data system that helps schools more effectively track student performance and foster stronger ties between the schools and community to improve student learning.

The Gates money cannot be used to pay for other programs that Hopson has proposed cutting back on, including special education services, the district’s CLUE program for gifted students and its school turnaround initiative known as the Innovation Zone.

The extension is a rare move by the philanthropic giant, which has spent more than $700 million nationally on teacher quality-related programs since 2008.

The Memphis district was one of the first to garner a Gates award aimed at teacher improvement efforts. The gift spurred the district to launch its Teacher and Leadership Effectiveness initiative to address longstanding failures to recruit, develop and retain talent for schools and classrooms.

Since 2009, Shelby County Schools has spent a total of $173 million on the initiative: more than $74 million from the Gates award; $82 million from the district; and more than $17 million from local philanthropists.