- (female announcer) Production funding for Behind The Headlines is made possible in part by the WKNO Production Fund, the WKNO Endowment Fund and by viewers like you, thank you.

- Joris Ray resigns, the Shelby County clerk is on vacation and much more, tonight on Behind The Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] - I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for joining us.

I am joined tonight by a roundtable of journalists to talk about the biggest stories of the week.

Abigail Warren from The Daily Memphian.

Thanks for being here, again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Toby Sells from The Memphis Flyer.

Thank you for being here again.

- Thank you, sir.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

We were joking before we started, how can it only be Thursday when we're taping this and there's already been so much news.

The biggest news though, would seem to be as of this moment, was Joris Ray resigning or, put another way, the school board voted to accept his resignation after the beginnings of an investigation into impropriety.

Daily Memphian first broke the story that there was accusations of Joris Ray having sexual relations with employees who worked for him at Memphis-Shelby County Schools, it was probably Shelby County Schools at that time, back before he was superintendent.

They worked out some sort of settlement this week, it looks like, Toby, but there's still a whole lot of, one has the sense that the Shelby County or the Memphis-Shelby County School Board would like to have taken this vote, settled the issue and they wanna move on.

But I think there are just a lot more questions.

- That seems to be the only answer is doing things efficiently, moving on to find somebody else.

They gave him, what was it, four hundred and eighty thousand dollar severance package, nearly five, nearly half a million dollars to walk away from this.

And the questions that I'm just seeing online is people are saying, well, if he broke the terms of his contract by doing this, why on earth do we owe him that money?

Maybe that's kind of a hot take.

I'm sure there's a lot of details in that contract.

And a lot of things that the lawyers worked out, but you know, the only thing I could think that the school board gets from this is, is that efficiency.

They can move quicker to fill the role and get things rolling for the next school year.

I don't know.

- Bill, your take.

It does seem like, I think many people will be glad to have Joris Ray, given the behavior, out of there, but still a whole lot of questions about how this happened.

Maybe it was you who had said, or I can't remember who told me, the school board has one employee, the superintendent, and then the rest of the employees work for the superintendent.

There's one employee.

How did they not know that this was going on?

There had been an investigation of Joris Ray back before he was hired.

It's just many more questions to get answered.

- Yeah and it gets into the history of really how this works.

And as we've chronicled, it is a very turbulent history of picking superintendents and who has been picked.

In this case, you had a search firm and that's the first big debate of this whole thing.

Search firm or no search firm, citizens committee or no citizens committee, just go local with someone in the system.

I don't think you're gonna see that this time, because what you had with Joris Ray and with Willie Herenton before him, several superintendents before him, were bonafide campaigns to stay local in selecting a superintendent.

In Herenton's case, the school board had actually made the decision to hire someone from outside the school system who, when he looked at the controversy, just said, nope, don't want the job because of that.

And then Herenton became superintendent, a role that he had effectively been serving in for at least a year before John Freeman retired and he became superintendent.

So yeah, there are a lot of questions.

The half a million dollars settlement, I think boils down to, does the school system want to be tangled up in court, negotiating this, should Ray choose to contest the school board using those grounds to just basically fire him with no kind of severance at all?

- Yeah.

Abigail, your take on all this.

- For me, the most interesting thing was that they ended the investigation and the investigation wasn't over when Dr. Ray did decide to resign.

So when you look at his contract, I'm pretty sure if you fire him, there has to be cause for it, but the investigation wasn't over and so there wasn't reason for that.

So he did resign, but that the investigation wasn't over and they ended the investigation was just kind of a sign that they were ready to move on.

- Yeah and I don't think they should be, I mean, bluntly, allowed to move on.

I think the public paid for the investigation, there could be details that have to be redacted.

I get that, names of victim.

I mean, I get that.

There's a certain amount of privacy in this.

But this is a public official, who wanted this job, who was paid by the public, the investigation was paid by the public.

It seems like whatever they found, clearly wasn't going.

I mean, you can only be left to assume that it wasn't going in a good direction, so they said, hey, resign please, we'll accept that resignation.

We won't fight you in court, as Bill said.

But that shouldn't end it.

In a private company, maybe, I don't know.

But this is a public position.

- I agree.

We need to know what happened and you can't just let a public official off the hook like that.

To whatever end, if they figure out that, innocence or guilt or whatever they came up with, we deserve answers, I think.

And hopefully down the road, we'll get some.

I was gonna mention here that on the day of the resignation, Ray took to Twitter thanking his staff for all the years that he'd served there.

Pointed out a lot of his achievements there, African-American male empowerment, third grade commitment plan to raise the reading level, universal screener assessment for the CLUE program, just academic advancements, access for all to different things.

The rebranding project that was a little bit controversial there in the day, paying teachers a living wage.

And at the end of it, he ended with a quote from the Bible that said, "For I know the plans I have for you, "plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future".

So maybe there's a chapter two here for Joris Ray.

- I think first of all, it's important to remember that this began as what was essentially a public record, the divorce decree in his case, spelled this out, sometimes divorce filings are not public.

Sometimes they are sealed, usually when children are involved, and in this case, they weren't.

The other point to remember is the investigation was not going to be limited to just what happened or what was alleged in the divorce filing.

So it could have been a broader investigation.

We don't know if that will ever come out.

I can tell you in terms of our reporting, there are public records requests that have been made for those records.

- And again, I think everybody in town, I hope, I mean, who covers the school system or covers public education should continue to pursue it because if there's a culture of not good management, of not good policies in place and you've got a person of power who is abusing that, or if that's not what happened, then Joris Ray's name should be cleared.

- That's right.

- And what happened should be put out there and you're right, Toby, to bring up some of the successes that he points to.

And so just this unfinished question and with a new, what about half the school board will be new, coming in when they're seated?

'Cause we just went through an election about what three or four?

- We went through an election for four of the nine seats.

- Yeah, so you can just feel them wanting to say, you know what, that was in the past, that was a lot of old board members, we wanna move forward.

But again, it's huge dollars.

It's however many tens of thousands, nienty thousand kids in the system and families and so on, just too many questions that it seems to me that still have to be pursued, not just for the news value and maybe the details and so on, but because it is such a prominent public institution.

Well, let's move on.

We're gonna come back to some education stuff, but I think the other big story this week is the Shelby County Clerk Wanda Halbert.

There has been just a litany of problems around license plates, around getting tags to people.

She was just reelected by, pretty handily, I think by all standards.

Then you may have to walk me through the timeline here, Bill, of what has happened and where they are as of Thursday morning.

- Wanda Halbert, the Shelby County Clerk, the office that is best known for issuing you your license plates when there are new ones and renewing your tags once every year, but who has other functions in that office as well.

This backlog really started in April.

That was when we did our first story on it, based on what we were seeing on social media posts from people complaining about it.

And it intensified in May, through June, got much worse.

Right before the election, Wanda Halbert announced that her office had caught up on this backlog, which had been thousands of license plates and tags.

Announced that her office had caught up on that, but that her office would be closed down for two weeks, the week we're currently in right now and another separate week in September to catch up on a backlog in other areas that the Clerk's Office handles, because it had been, in effect, all-hands-on-deck to resolve the backlog with the license plates and the tags.

So this week begins and the Tennessee Comptroller's Office has already been contacted by the Shelby County Commission with county commissioners who called in a bipartisan vote, I might add, for the state to investigate ways to possibly help the Clerk's Office or have some oversight of the Clerk's Office.

As the shutdown began this week, the office closed to the public, the Comptroller's Office said, we have confirmed that the clerk is in Jamaica, on vacation, as this shutdown begins.

And the State Comptroller, Jason Mumpower, actually used the phrase AWOL in referring to Halbert's absence from this.

Keep in mind that Halbert has said from the beginning of this, that she personally was helping her staff stuff the envelopes in the office, that that's how much of an all-hands-on-deck response this was.

And there were some county commissioners who said, well, maybe that's part of the problem.

We put money in your budget to hire people, those positions have not been filled.

So, and you've returned money in your budget, too, that you haven't used.

So maybe you're not running the office the best way.

- Yeah.

I would point out, I don't want to be self promotional of Daily Memphian, but Otis Sanford who contributes to WKNO and contributes a column to The Daily Memphian, wrote an utterly scathing column this last week about Wanda Halbert.

And Otis is, people think of Otis as an opinion person and he is now, but Otis was, for decades, a journalist and an editor.

And he lays out a really, just a terrible picture of what's going on in that office.

And that it's not just the license plates.

And I do encourage people concerned about this because there is so much business licenses, marriage licenses, a lot of tax revenue, liquor licenses, and such in unincorporated Shelby County.

There's a whole lot.

I mean, the Shelby County Clerk's Office is meant to be a nonpartisan, not particularly political office.

It's kind of the boring but important business of the county and you can't help but think, I'm gonna turn to Abigail for some thoughts on this, primarily covering Collierville and Germantown and you can just feel somewhere with the state getting involved, some legislator, probably from the suburbs, beginning to draft a bill that if the state can't take over the County Clerk's Office, as of yet, you can imagine a bill coming forward early in the session in January, that if things aren't getting better, the state is gonna step in.

- Yeah.

I think that's always possible.

The state does look for ways to step in.

It's been something that they've looked at with TVA and MLG&W with that there's already talk of legislation and what that looks like.

So I think it's very possible that the state could step in, but even when Bill wrote about the vote of no confidence that Shelby County Commission gave Mark Billingsley, who's from the suburbs gave, he had some thoughts on it and was very public about his disappointment that the state had to come in.

So yeah, in the suburbs, there's just as much frustration as there is in the city.

- Anything more from, Toby, anyone?

- Yeah.

I think Otis was right on.

I read the column this week and his frustrations are the frustrations, I think, of everybody across Shelby County that deals with this.

And as he points out in there, if you're an adult, you're gonna have to go to this office, usually for one thing is to get that driver, get that license plate there.

And as people on the internet said, you had one job, really, the way people see the Clerk's Office over there and she didn't do it.

That column was scathing.

I wanted to read here, Mumpower's official statement from the state that came out on Twitter earlier this week, it said, talk about scathing, "The Clerk's trip shows a lack," trip to Jamaica, "shows a lack of leadership and concern for her staff "who are left to address the backlog without her presence in the office."

It goes on, but the words from Mumpower here, it says, "shows that her apologies were meaningless "and her decision to take a trip damages her credibility "and shows a complete lack of awareness.

"The clerk is AWOL while her staff is left behind trying to clean up the mess."

And now I know after a lot of this has come out, there's been talk of a recall, how would that work?

What are other ways to potentially take over the office or do things?

And I think the word is we couldn't have a recall vote until like six months after the election?

- It's 180 days.

- Okay.

And then you would have to get a petition of what, fifteen percent of people in the county, which is 80,000 something signatures on this thing and then have another special election to do that.

So I don't know what's in the cards over there, but I know people are angry.

- Speaking of people angry at politicians, I guess that's the segue, just a quick note that former Tennessee House Speaker, Republican Glen Casada, his former Chief of Staff, pled not guilty after they were indicted on 20 counts each.

Charged with eight counts of bribery, six counts of honest services wire fraud, two counts of bribery and kickbacks, much more.

The charges also include theft from programs around federal funds, conspiracy to commit money laundering, fictitious name to carry out a fraud.

So I don't want us just to focus on our local problems, but also at the state, which does like to come in and tell us how Memphis and Shelby County, how to do things, Nashville included, the cities included, there's certainly plenty of problems up there.

- You know, before we leave the Halbert situation, I did wanna say that, I've seen a lot of other internet chatter on the different cities' subreddits, the Knoxville subreddit, the Nashville subreddit, and people will post this story about the Halbert situation here.

and there's a lot of "shake my head" and "that's Memphis".

And these people see this and they see that she was elected by more than 10,000 votes in the last election and they walk away with this perception of Memphis, that we're this second rate, immature, can't-get-our-stuff-together city and that we want these politicians that act this way and that's okay.

And people need to know that is the perception that people around the state have.

- Well, I would be quick to add, and we've noted it before that this state has a history of such things that are way outside of Memphis.

And I will go to a state legislator in the 1980s, who was reelected from his jail cell while he was serving a sentence for tax evasion.

- Right.

- That was not a Memphis problem, right?

- No, that was not.

- Yes.

- Yes.

- We will segue into, about 10 minutes left here, suburban elections.

We just had this big election locally, but we've got the November elections coming up, including a number of important races in the suburbs.

- Right.

And Bartlett and Lakeland are kind of interesting as both their mayors are stepping down.

Josh Roman, who's running for mayor in Lakeland, is unopposed, so that's interesting to see that he's the mayor, essentially, come November.

Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo is unopposed, as well as Alderman Mary Anne Gibson is unopposed, so it's interesting to see some of the unopposed races, but I think the one to watch is gonna be the Bartlett mayor race as Mayor Keith McDonald is stepping down after 20, about 20 years in office.

And so really it's a change of leadership there because Mark Brown, who's been their city manager for many years, is also stepping down when Mayor McDonald steps down.

And then also in Lakeland, they have a new town manager or a new city manager out there and so really it's kind of this change of leadership and the passing of the torch, because while the mayor is important, the city manager is the one that runs the day to day operations of the town.

And so that's really a big deal that not only the mayor's leaving, but also they're having that change in leadership inside their city halls.

- You and I next week, we pre-taped a bit, had a conversation with James Lewellen, the long-time, 27 years as city administrator of Collierville, talking about how it city goes from, what it was 10 or 15,000 when he started as city administrator, it's now 50, it's continuing to grow.

And when you talk about Lakeland and we talked about this with James Lewellen on next week's show, you think about Lakeland, Arlington, Bartlett, they are prime for potentially explosive growth as a part of the whole Ford plant and all the attendant suppliers and other companies that are gonna go in up at the Megasite or Blue Oval City.

I still call it the Memphis Megasite.

- And while they are, there is a lot of, economic development is very competitive and so I know that Germantown and Collierville are also looking for ways, they believe people will drive to, from Germantown and Collierville, to the Megasite, just because of the amenities that they offer.

And so if there's something you want in Collierville that maybe it's the schools or something else, I think they'll benefit from it too, but yes, Bartlett, Lakeland, Arlington will see direct impact.

- Move on to, again, speaking of elections, Steve Mulroy is the new district attorney, will be in office next week is that?

- September 1st.

- September 1st.

We've reached out to his office and hope to have him on.

We had him on as a candidate with Amy Weirich, the outgoing district attorney, but it's a whole shift there.

He's got what, some 12, so far about 12 new attorneys to hire, he's named his transition team that includes everyone from the police chief from Germantown to the criminal justice reform folks from Just City.

Van Turner's running that transition and against the backdrop of, and I think you're doing a story on this and maybe we are as well, bail reform.

And it's a whole new era of, in a time when crime is way up, we've got in the district attorney and over in the juvenile court judge in very, very different philosophies of crime.

And in some, it's unrelated, I think, to this bail reform change, but it is a kind of marker of a different approach to crime.

- That's right.

This, a lot of this started back in December when there were advocacy groups, Just City, the Wharton Law Firm, ACLU, some others threatened to sue the city or sue the county if we didn't change our bail system here.

They went through a mediation process.

They came out on the other side with a new standing bail order that's supposed to be, I was told, is gonna be unveiled this week.

And that's gonna look like, if within 12 hours of somebody going to jail, they will be reviewed.

They'll, all their information go through a calculator to say, well, you can afford this much bail.

You can't afford this much.

And then within 48 hours, they'll have a bail hearing where their attorney will be present, the prosecutor and a judicial official will be present, too, To say, okay, we've looked at all this, this is what we think needs to happen.

We're gonna set no bail.

We're gonna set a lower bail, or we're gonna set an unaffordable bail for you to keep you here to ensure that you come back for your court date.

Josh Spickler with Just City said, this was really big news.

And he said that this new bail order that we have here is gonna be the best in Tennessee, probably in the country.

And all of that was kind of happening as the Mulroy campaign was going along, so it's a bit of just good timing on their part.

As Mulroy comes in, one of his responsibilities will be to meet in this new courtroom, this new $2 million courtroom, to talk about how we're gonna set bail, what we're gonna do with these individuals and they're gonna take every individual as they come.

So kind of a brand new day.

- With just a couple minutes left, I wanted to come back.

You, Abigail, were part of a really great.

Again, I'm touting The Daily Memphian too much today, probably, but, and we'll talk about some of the stuff Flyer's doing and other people are doing great work too, but you did parts of the story on the third grade reading cliff, the third grade retention policy, which retention is a very benign word for holding back third graders across Tennessee who don't hit certain standards on their TCAP tests.

It kicks in this spring.

If kids don't hit the numbers, they can potentially go into tutoring and summer programs to get their numbers up.

But David Waters did a number of kind of a deep look at the history of these in other states.

And there's a lot of risks.

We can say it's a well-intentioned bill that was passed by the state, but some 50,000 3rd graders every year across the state do not pass that test.

And holding back sounds good 'cause everyone wants kids to read, but David and you and your stories raised a lot of questions about the real damage it can do to kids in the history in other states and other communities of holding back third graders, holding back any elementary school kid is not a magic bullet, a magic elixir for solving the problems but talk about.

You mostly been writing about the suburbs getting very worried about what this could mean.

- Right.

Last night I was sitting in a work session in Germantown and Jason Manuel, the superintendent out there, raises the issue that the number one reason kids drop out of high school is because they were retained in an earlier grade.

It's not because they can't read.

And there's also a question about, TCAP is a standards based assessment, it's not a literacy test.

And so when you, when they do a test like the STAR, which is kind of a national literacy test, when you look at that, really Germantown has about 94, Germantown, I'm singling out, but they have like 94% of their students are reading on grade level, which is great.

Then you do the standards based assessment, which is different, the TCAP, and they get it back and they've only got 75% of their kids who scored.

And that was the highest in the state.

So that means that's one fourth of their third graders that could be held back.

So the suburbs, especially, are really pushing communication.

They're meeting with parents.

A lot of 'em did test their second graders to kind of see where, who those students are, but it's one day, it's one test.

So if a child has a rough morning at home, that could impact their test and then they may have to go to this summer camp.

But also there's concerns about when they get the scores, the timing of when they get the scores, parents plan summer vacation, so they may plan to go to the beach and their child has to go to this mandatory summer camp.

Okay, so they've gotta stay with grandma, grandpa, or they have to cancel this trip that they've had for a year.

So the timing of when you find out, it's just, there are a lot of questions still, and it'll be interesting to see what those numbers look like when the data does come out.

- And we had some folks on from Memphis-Shelby County Schools, some months ago, some of the folks who work under former Superintendent Ray, talking about this and they've got money and they've got a plan and they're really focused on this, but it, I mean, hopefully the distraction of Joris Ray leaving doesn't hit that too much.

The other things that David Waters, who wrote a lot of this, brought up or issues around, most kids who do really do struggle to read, have learning disabilities and not all school systems are set up to work with kids with learning disabilities.

There's a lot of social-emotional.

I mean, no one wants to make excuses for the schools or the kids who can't read.

But it's kind of a lot.

With just a minute left, you've got a big mental health piece coming out in The Flyer this week?

- Yeah.

It's on the stands right now.

It's called "It's Okay To Not Be Okay".

Our Chris McCoy talked to a lot of mental health professionals all across Memphis to find out that we had a mental health crisis on the globe, especially after COVID, there's not nearly enough therapists in Memphis to handle what we're doing.

If you find one, they're not gonna take insurance, they're all private pay now.

But the state, Governor Lee and the legislature, allocated $560 million for mental health services in Tennessee, that means that rates for Medicaid payments are gonna go up and hopefully more help is on the way, but it's an important piece, really well written piece, go check it out.

- Yeah and Bill, right before the show, dropped a factoid on us that blew us away.

- Yes.

And this kind of got overlooked on election night because election returns came late here.

JB Smiley, Memphis City Councilmember who ran for the democratic primary for governor with Jason Martin who wound up winning that race statewide and is the democratic challenger to Bill Lee, the margin in that race was 1400.

- That's crazy.

- That's amazing.

- Amazing.

Yep.

Thank you.

Thank you for joining us again.

Next week, James Lewellen, the long-time town administrator from Collierville.

If you missed any of the show today, you can go to iTunes, Spotify, wherever you get your podcasts.

You can also go to wkno.org, Daily Memphian, you can go to YouTube.

Thanks for joining us and we'll see you next week.

[intense orchestral music] [acoustic guitar chords]