Capacity issues at heart of races

Six women are competing for three spots on the Germantown Municipal School District board, and how to handle the district’s capacity issues is at the heart of each race.

Two incumbents, Natalie Williams and chairwoman Linda Fisher, are hoping to retain their seats against challengers Suzanne Jones and Laura Meanwell, respectively. Amy Eoff and Mindy Fischer are competing for the Position 5 seat after board member Ken Hoover decided not to run again.

That means the board, which had no turnover in nearly its first three years, will have at least two new faces: whoever lands Hoover’s seat and Betsy Landers, who was appointed to Mark Dely’s seat after he moved to Indiana this summer.

Williams said having two new members out of five makes retaining the other incumbents important for institutional knowledge. When they started as a board at the creation of the district in 2013, none of the five had any experience as a school board member.

“I do not want our district to be in that position again because I believe it will set us back years,” said Williams, a teacher at the Bodine School for students with learning disabilities. She also has two children in Germantown schools.

Fisher, whose children graduated from Germantown school, said the original board’s track record of getting the district up and running in eight months and the district’s continued academic and financial success should support her case for reelection.

“We have been operational — now we can be aspirational,” she said. “Now we can look at what else can we do for our students.”

The most pressing need in the district, all six candidates agreed, is building space. The district is over capacity at the elementary school level by about 500 students. How to solve that problem is where some candidates differ.

The city’s Board of Mayor and Aldermen presented the school leaders with the option of a new school site near Winchester and Crestwyn at the southern tip of the city. The school district has since established a committee to review the site, along with several others, before deciding whether to move forward. The city has also attempted to purchase Germantown Elementary and Germantown Middle schools, the city’s namesake schools that stayed with Shelby County Schools after the demerger in 2013.

Williams and Fisher both said they will wait for the committee to return its recommendations before issuing strong opinions regarding the Winchester site, which many parents have said isn’t conducive to the idea of a neighborhood school. Some of the school board challengers agree with that assessment.

Meanwell, who has two children at Houston High and successfully fought to have school start times pushed back at the middle and high school levels, said she is firmly against the Winchester option.

“I don’t have all the answers,” she said. “I think this is where we engage everybody.”

Jones, a former vice president at Bank of America who has children at Dogwood Elementary, Houston Middle and Houston High, said she doesn’t like the Winchester site either, but is glad the school district is seeking feedback about the issue.

“I think we have gone through a ton of change in Germantown, and I felt maybe there wasn’t as much communication as I, as a parent, would have liked or as much transparency,” she said.

In the sole race without an incumbent, the Germantown Municipal Council PTA president Mindy Fischer is running her first school board race after years of following the board’s actions closely, with many important votes ending in a split board.

“Discussion is wonderful and disagreement can lead to some wonderful solutions,” Fischer said. “I wish that the tone had been more friendly and collaborative in how to approach all these issues. I feel like going forward that’s going to change no matter who’s elected.”

Fischer said she’s not enthusiastic about the Winchester site, as she favors schools in a neighborhood, but would wait for the committee’s recommendations before making a decision. She has children at Houston Middle and Houston High.

Her challenger, Eoff, also has children at Dogwood, Houston Middle and Houston High, and has been involved with several school-level PTA groups.

“When you’re there every single day ... you see what’s going really well and you see some things that maybe you want to tweak,” Eoff said. “And that spurs you to want to do more.”

Eoff said she drove down to the potential school site on Winchester. “It’s just too far out for it to be part of a community neighborhood school,” she said.

One of the primary jobs of the school board is to hire the superintendent, but the challengers all said they are supportive of Superintendent Jason Manuel.

Eoff called Manuel “an educator with a heart for children,” while Jones said he is “the key to this district.”

“I think we absolutely need to keep him in place and let him play out his vision for the schools,” Meanwell said.