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Major changes in the school system.

Crime is down.

Election Day is coming.

And much more tonight on Behind the headlines.

I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by a roundtable of journalist covering some of the biggest stories of the week.

I'll start with Laura Testino now with the Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here again.

Yeah, thanks for having me.

Toby sells with the Memphis flyer.

Thanks for being here again.

Thank you for having me.

Along with Bill Dries.

Reporter with the Daily Memphian.

We'll start with both elections and just big changes in the school system, which you have covered for a long time Laura.

Now with us covering the schools and some other things that we'll talk about later.

But the new superintendent is about 100 and some days in and has started making some big changes around some cuts and staff addressing policies around things like overtime.

Talk about what you've seen so far.

Right.

So big item in the news is just that the staff cuts eventually passed along with the district's $1.8 billion budget a few weeks ago.

Those positions a colleague of mine at the Daily Memphian and I can Jemison looked at to sort of understand where are the realignments happening.

We know that some of the positions that were cut, about half of them were vacancies.

And a big push from Superintendent Figgins was that a lot of these cuts would actually result in fewer central office staff and more people at schools.

What we're seeing from some of the initial data that's coming out is that these are mostly going to be school based positions.

So people who are doing leadership, people who are helping teachers in specific schools be better at teaching.

Those are the positions that tend to be are being cut, that are well, that will be that rather than being in central office, will be at a school rather than.

Yes, rather than seeing more teachers.

We're seeing more people in schools supporting specific schools rather than coming from central office to do those roles.

That meant that there were about 500 teacher vacancies at this at this point in the summer around the time that these cuts were happening.

So the big push now is really making sure that those teacher vacancies come back down.

We don't usually get data every year around this time for what the teacher vacancies look like.

So Dr. Feagins is more transparent than predecessors have been with that data.

We know that there are, as of earlier this week, about 300 offers out for teachers that would bring those vacancies of all accepted down to 200, which is much more on par with what we have seen historically for teacher vacancies as we start the school year.

But that is the kind of big push at this point is to really make sure that those teacher vacancies come down.

The overtime story, I think you did that story.

It was interesting.

It was it was it was a lot of money, $1,000,000 in overtime.

And I think basically that the superintendent said, look, there was $1,000,000, I think, in the last year in unauthorized overtime that needs to happen.

And she wants to tighten that down and say, hey, overtime needs to be improved by me, the superintendent or someone I designate, and that the whole policy needs to be reviewed.

Right.

I mean, is that again and against $101.8 billion budget, maybe not a lot of money, but still it was it was notable to just highlight that highlighted to the school board and say we're going to crack down on this.

Sure.

So the district has for many years wanted to do biannual policy reviews, which is board policy.

So, you know, there's always kind of the push and pull of how much of this is the administration going to bring to us as the board.

How much of this is the board going to initiate itself?

Dr. Fagan's is really seem to take the approach that she's going to be reviewing these policies and bringing them to the board to really start to make some updates to a policy manual that, for the large part hasn't changed so much since the merger of the two school systems back a decade ago.

And this overtime policy is one of those.

The major change, is that, yes, she will review these overtime requests and but it was something that was brought up as a policy change, as board members asked about.

That's how that million dollar figure is revealed.

I'll bring you in, Bill, while you're not covering education for us.

You cover county commission.

You and I have interviewed many of the last super attendance.

We do have Superintendent Fagan scheduled to come in September and county commission which you do cover.

I mean, obviously funds the school system in no small part.

Your thoughts on what you've seen slightly removed, but you know your thoughts on what you've seen from the new superintendent.

It's it's a pretty big change.

It's a change in style.

It's a change in culture, I think.

But we have to remember that the board has also changed a lot over the last decade.

The school board now does not react the way that it did when all of this started.

If you'll remember, when the ASD came into being and the school system moved toward the merger, that move to merger came from the school board.

It didn't come from the superintendent at that time crying for cash.

It's hard to imagine the school board coming up with some kind of move on their own on that part.

Yeah.

Which is which is also something that I think is at play in the school board races that the voters are about to decide.

Yeah, we'll talk a bit about election saying I'll just say, you know, again, because we've interviewed and you know back at the old Daily News and since the Daily Memphian and covering the school so much and the merger and you know behind the headlines was launched around that and we did all those shows I not since Darcy Hopson who became the superintendent post-merger and who was sort of a change agent, whether or not he was super effective or he did the right thing.

Separate from that, he was trying to make change.

He was trying to close schools.

He was trying to, you know, combine the school systems.

And then it did seem like, I don't know if you agree with this.

It seemed like the last few superintendents like, okay, things are pretty good.

We want to get our scores up.

We're just sort of dealing with the problem of the day or the week, not systemic change.

Is that fair?

I think and I'll let Bill chime in here, too, but it seems maybe more like stabilizing, right?

Like you had so much change happened, you had so many schools being taken away.

You had so much of what the school district was doing, like creating the ice zone, which Superintendent Fagan's has effectively gotten rid of, which was the district's response to the HST.

It was its own plan for how it was going to keep its lowest performing schools on a trajectory to improve so that they wouldn't be taken over.

Yeah, that sort of got to stable out and I don't think that we really got to see what those effects could have been because of the pandemic.

You know, we had Joris Ray had about a yea before that invaded and every school district in the country was hit really hard.

And also, I think it's really hard to miss that when Joris Ray became superintendent, the approach not only became different, the school system became more insular.

The focus became on we have to do right by our people who are in the system.

Yeah, and I think it's just my opinion from watching from a distance.

I think that what happened in the classroom began to really suffer as a result of that.

And it looked, I think to many parents that I've talked to, like the school system was looking out for its own and not really looking out in equal measure for students.

I remember bringing Toby in and our kids are at the same age, but with the kids and the I remember when the school system introduced a ton of half days when Joris ray took over, and half days are the bane of a working parents existence, right?

I mean, it just and my kids were not in in the Memphis Shelby County school system.

But the half days are a nightmare.

And I remember thinking exactly what Bill said, like, that's for the school, not for the kids or the families.

That's exactly right.

I mean, you have to completely rearrange your entire day, try to find, you know, childcare and this and that.

It upends the whole thing.

So, yeah, I mean, keep those kids in school.

It's good for them and good for us.

So let's say wait to you.

There was a the school settled a lawsuit recently that had made a lot of headlines and was very confusing to a lot of people talk about that.

And of course this is is way smaller than what you all are talking about, these big sweeping changes.

But it's a real thing.

The school board just settled last week, two weeks ago.

So the lawsuit with the Freedom from Religion Foundation, they were acting on behalf of a group called the Satanic Temple.

They wanted to have after school meetings at Chimney Rock Elementary School for their after school Satan club.

The Satanic Temple says they don't believe in Satan.

It's really just for free thought.

And those kind of things.

So they applied and anybody can apply.

Any group can apply to have these meetings at these schools.

They said they were met with.

You know, the officials were dragging their feet.

And when they were allowed to do it, they have these these extra fees, these exorbitant fees to be able to hold their their meetings at the school.

And so those fees became kind of the crux of this lawsuit.

They said we're being discriminated against because we've got Christian organizations that aren't paying the same money to the school system.

And, you know, we need this.

To be fair.

They took them to court and the school board just settled $15,000.

Most of that was legal fees, but there was a $1 nominal charge for damages for the Satanic Club.

That's what they got.

And they also, you know, the school board also, you know, had agreed that they're not going to discriminate against any clubs in the future.

Well, the school board actually took a vote on this, didn't it, Laura, on on whether or not they could hold the assemblies that they wanted to.

I actually don't know that this ever did come to a board vote, but there was a there was a press conference for.

Yes.

Where that was actually, you know, as I'm sure you know, mentioned in the freedom from religions response to voluntarily settling was that that would not happen again.

It was you know, we had plenty of clergy and the superintendent at that point, Tony Williams, board member Marissa Calvo for Cordova and board chair, the Rev Althea Green, I think making some comments that freedom from religion found to be very pointed and divisive towards them.

I mean, they were certainly, you know, broadcasting a point of view.

So, you know, well, let's see what schools for a minute just and segue into elections.

Early voting is actually underway for I believe, for the school board positions is that five of the nine five of the nine seats are up.

Thank you, Bill.

Talk a little bit about the school board races and we'll segue into some other races going on.

Sure.

So this is the first time that all of these races, this set of of the school board seats have been contested, elections all at once.

The last time that all the school board races were contested was in 2018 when which was the alternate set of four seats that were up.

And so right now you see three incumbents at this point running.

We've had incumbent Frank Johnson in District seven withdraw from the race and give an endorsement to opponent Dannielle Huggins, who would be a newcomer to the seat.

Longtime board member Kevin Woods in District four is not seeking reelection.

That's an open seat as well.

But then we have challengers for District three and Frazier, where incumbent Stephanie Love is the only of the three incumbents who has won an election contested election before We have in District five.

Mauricio Calvo is the incumbent who received his seat from appointment.

Well, I'll probably remember Sheleah Harris, who is in that seat, created the vacancy about a year ago over some of the superintendent search kerfuffle at that point and then in District two, which I think is a really big, big race to watch among the challengers, it's board chair Althea Greene and Natalie McKinney, who was we also have Ernest Gillespie in that seat.

But really kind of the money is being raised and split between McKinney and Greene.

McKinney was very vocal during the superintendent search and has wanted to be a kind of challenger to the idea that the board should be following more of its policy.

She's a former policy office leader in the district, and you've done profiles, I think, of all the races that are published in the Daily Memphian in recent weeks.

People can go to the Daily Memphian and get that, you can go to Shelby Vote.or and also see the all the ballot.

And you can see everybody who's up to race early voting ends this coming Saturday, I believe, on the 27th.

And election day is what?

Bill, Help me.

November, Thursday, August 1st, Thursday, August 1st.

You go.

Let's say we have other races that are up for this summer, which are primary races, but are really, given the nature of politics, are really final races, some state houses and so on.

Talk about what's going on.

You have state and federal primaries.

That means you have a US Senate primary that is statewide, the seat that Marsha Blackburn holds.

She's running for reelection and has primary opposition and will have a Democratic challenger come November.

Both of the congressional seats, the eighth and ninth District that covers Shelby County, all 13 of the state House seats that cover Shelby County and two of the five state Senate seats that cover Shelby County.

Then you have county general elections, Five of the nine school board seats that we've talked about, the county only countywide race this year is the race for General Sessions court clerk, which has become a really hotly contested race that both local parties have gotten involved in kind of a free for all on that.

Arlington municipal elections and municipal judges in Bartlett and Germantown.

Words I never thought I'd hear you say the General Sessions court clerk race has gotten hotly contested, but highly and as that is, I guess, the result really of the focus on crime right?

I mean, it's or is it because of the candidates involved or both?

It's both.

It's the candidates involved.

Lisa Arnold, who retired from the office after working there and in the court system in general for about 30 to 40 years.

And Tami Sawyer, who is a former Shelby County commissioner, who knocked off Joe Brown, the incumbent Democratic clerk in the March primaries, and the connection to the crime discussion really is the role of the General Sessions court plays and the clerk's office in turn, because it's kind of the organizing point for the cases that are heard there.

With about 10 minutes left here, we'll switch to talk about courts.

There were a couple of federal circuit Court decisions, Toby, that you all were covering.

I think we may have touched on, but talk about very significant big impacts across Tennessee.

It's a yeah, it's a big deal.

The sixth Circuit Court, you know, handed out a couple of losses to the local LGBTQ community.

The first ruling came from that court that said that Tennesseans can no longer change their sex on their birth certificates.

This becomes important for those in the trans community.

You know, you're born one sex, you transition to another.

Now you can change your name on these birth certificates all you want, but the new ruling says you can't change the sex on that part of the discussion.

On the ruling, they said that really the state owns these birth certificates and the state can collect whatever data that they want and they view sex as kind of an unchangeable historical fact at your birth.

And so there's no reason they can see to allow folks to change these.

It's unknown just yet whether an appeal is coming for this when there were some Memphians involved in the original lawsuit.

So we'll see what happens there.

The second one came a little bit later.

I know y'all wrote about it.

The court allowed Tennessee's drag show band to get back in, back in order.

Hear the original lawsuit came from Friends of George's, a local Memphis group here that said what was called the Tennessee Entertainment Act.

It violated their first First Amendment rights, the Constitution.

And you know, wanted the ban gone While the court was figuring it out.

They lifted the ban temporarily to allow these shows to go on.

Just last week, the court came and said, nope, the ban is constitutional.

It can stand.

Friends of George's didn't prove that they were actually harmed by the ban in any way.

And so now drag shows are banned, but not everywhere.

So you can still have them in certain places.

You can't have them in public areas and you can't have these shows or any adult cabaret performance, define that as you like, in any place where these shows could be viewed by a minor, because that's kind of the conservative argument against these shows, is they're harmful to minors and we can't allow those to happen.

And as you all reported, friends of George's has vowed that they're going to fight on.

They've got an attorney with Donati law firm who says might be an uphill battle, but th We'll do another kind of, I'm doing hard segues today, to crime and I'll talk with you because you, Bill, the police director was reporting to the city council this past week on some crime stats and some other trends in crime overall.

And this was seconded by the Shelby County Crime Commission excuse me that through June 30, the six months through June 30, compared to the prior year, property and violent crime were down 18%, homicides down 11, robberies down 27%, car thefts down 40%, nearly 40%, and theft from cars down 23%.

Awfully sexual and aggravated assaults were really only slightly down pretty much the same.

But the MPD talked about some of the strategies that they are pursuing to try to fight crime.

Council wants more information, it seems more data, more information, more communication from the interim police, is she still the interim police director?

Yeah.

Interim police director.

Talk about what you heard.

Yeah, the council said these figures are great, but you didn't have the council just standing up and cheering this this drop in crime.

What you saw was the council saying, Yeah, but we want to look at more than just last year.

We want to look at the previous years and how it stands against that.

And they're also welcoming the city's basic method on one front here, and that is to just saturate one area, one zip code, not only for enforcement, but for also for things like code enforcement, for blight and things like that as well as looking for moving violations out there on the street.

I mean, they're not doing a roadblock type approach to it, but they are pulling cars over if they see what might be described as minor violations.

I had a lovely a lovely visit with an MPD officer in Midtown recently.

I've been lived in downtown and Midtown for 28 years and I've driven down Union many, many times.

And I got to visit with an officer and they were very polite, very professional, and it was shocking to get pulled over, as many times have.

I've driven down that and but which is fine.

I was going over the speed limit You fought the law and the law, and the law won.

I didn't fight anything!

I was like, Thank you, sir.

And I paid.

I think I already paid my take on it.

But I'll tell you the same thing.

We were, Our kids were at camp and so we were having to drive to Bartlett every day to pick them up.

We were driving to Austin Peay.

We counted from there back to home.

We saw about ten cars pulled over.

It might have been the first time in Shelby County.

I was like, I need to watch my speed here.

I need to watch what I'm doing.

If it was a very different feeling.

So, you know, with them and highway patrol.

And seemingly not pulled over in a big crime, just ticketing, ticketing.

Right.

And you see it more in the north loop.

You see, I don't drive in the south loop that much.

But back to you, Bill.

They're clearly out there more.

I don't know if we have the data, but the visibility is definitely up.

The crucial test is going to is going to be can this be sustained?

Can this drop, particularly in violent crime, be sustained?

Yeah.

And the council's taking a wait and see attitude on that.

Yeah, go ahead.

Yeah, I just I just wonder what it's going to take for us to feel it, right?

I mean, you can still go around Midtown, downtown, talk to people, and crime is still top of mind, right?

I mean, maybe not like it was back in, you know, a couple of years ago when we had some crazy stuff happening.

But, you know, you talk to folks and that's still a fear.

That's still a big fear of what's happening, even though we can look at these statistics all day long, you know, until we actually feel it and people stop tweeting about it, maybe I just don't know what it's going to take for us to change our attitude.

You know, when I tell people crime is falling and they're like, what planet do you live on?

You know, it's just a it's a different conversation.

Yeah, yeah.

I'll say we had a couple of conversations recently.

You can get at wkno.org On The Daily Memphian's site about crime and public safety one was with Tarik Sugarmon, the the juvenile court judge, where juvenile charges are down 38% in the first quarter.

So it was an interesting conversation about what they're doing and trying to intervene and who they're holding and who they're not and so on so forth.

We also, excuse me, recently talked to Josh Spickler of Just City, a kind of criminal justice reformist, to simplify his role.

And Brent Taylor, the state senator who has had a much more tough on crime and a really, really good debate conversation.

Truly different approaches.

And Josh talks a lot about perceptions of crime.

And Brett Taylor talked a lot about the realities of victims and so on.

So again, you can get those at wkno.org or Daily Memphian or wherever you get your podcast video.

Let's with a few minutes left here let's talk, we'll turn to you here Toby xAI, the big supercomputer, Elon Musk.

We've talked about that.

People have read about that, but it's causing some really interesting, complicated dynamics around water.

xAI has said that it's likely to build a g water facility near its plant.

A big supercomputer like that takes a million and a million and a half gallons a day, even more as it ramps up, in water.

Initially, it's gonna be pulling from MLGW, which pulls from the aquifer, but it's going to build what's called a gray water facility where they take treated water from the wastewater facility, which now goes in the river.

And they can use that with some further treatment to cool the computer.

And it's spurred conversation that perhaps MLGW is going to build a gray water facility.

Thoughts on all of that?

I mean, Musk himself, you talked about it a couple of weeks ago, super complicated figure to put it lightly.

And he said some incredibly objectively offensive things.

Right.

But this this is an economic development project, healthy project perhaps, and a lot of approach to water and electricity and power.

Absolutely.

And if this gray water facility happens, I mean, this is something that we should have done in Memphis 20 years ago.

We've been cooling our gas power plant out there, you know, with this pristine water from the aquifer.

And, you know, it's not necessarily the volume of the water, but the quality and what it could do down the road.

So that could be a great thing.

There was a great story this week from the Institute of Public Service reporting out of the U of M. Micaela Watts did a great story that really surrounded the questions that we still have about this thing, right?

I mean, it was announced it was a big to do and then it went quiet again.

And I think were it not for that one whoever deep source that you all have over at the Daily Memphian, we would know a lot less about what's happening in this community.

And why is that?

Who is talking?

Can we talk to City Hall about can we talk to the chamber about it?

who knows what's happened?

He's like, Oh, it's up and run.

And we're like, When did that happen?

You know, I mean, just so many questions that surround this thing.

But if we can get this gray water facility in and, you know, they're talking about these megapack batteries that we could use to kind of stabilize the electric grid if we can get these technologies from from this supercomputer, this xAI project in town might not be a bad thing.

I just want somebody to talk to the community about it.

Yeah.

And it is an interesting thing when they're not taking so far any incentive state, local know, then there's less pressure on them to talk about it because incentives you have to go before all these committees and and groups and this time they they don't they're not really required to.

That's right.

And and this is a really fast moving project.

I mean, really fast.

The computer is up and running.

We've really not seen an economic development project like this in in the whole era of public incentives and the debate that ensues around those.

With just a minute left, Laura, again, welcome to Daily Memphian.

You were at Chalkbeat for a number of years covering education.

Before that, the commercial appeal you covered Memphis for, what, nine, eight, nine, ten years?

I'm I'm flattered, but I've been here for five.

COVID makes time, you know, amorphous.

So talk a little bit more about what you'll be doing.

You're covering education kind of right now with the school boards and superintendent things.

But there's other things you're going to be covering.

Yes, that's right.

I'm excited to be in this new enterprise role at the Daily Memphian.

I'm excited also to really sort of focus education coverage on Frayser and sort of the impacts that huge and reform policies has had on that community and sort of what the neighborhood feels that impact has been like.

Of course, a big, big point there is, as we've talked about, the achievement school district in ASD, which is shrinking, has only three schools left at a time when it used to have 29.

So excited to dive in.

Awesome.

I had to.

I didn't give enough time on that.

Let me also point out that Toby Sells has written a book.

People can get it.

Just search Toby Sells - Haint Blues Haint Blues.

Haint Blues, and you were nice to sit down to an interview with me, which people can find in the Daily Memphian a podcast on another the sidebar that I do sometimes.

That is all the time we have for the show tonight.

Congratulations, Toby.

Thank you.

I meant to give you more time to talk about the and we will see you next week.

If you missed any show, go to wkno.org and the Daily Memphian site Thanks very much.

We'll see you next week.