- (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.

- A look back at 2021, and a look forward to the new year, tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

[intense orchestral music] - I'm Eric Barnes with The Daily Memphian, and thanks for joining us.

I am joined by a roundtable of journalists this week, talking about the year that was, and the year ahead.

I'm joined by Toby Sells, News Editor at Memphis Flyer, thanks for being here.

- Happy New Year, Eric.

- Absolutely.

Daja Henry is a reporter with The Daily Memphian, thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Along with Bill Dries, reporter at the Daily Memphian.

We start with, of course, the biggest story was COVID, and I mean, there's so many parts to it we could do, just bore people to death, Bill, with everything that happened.

But for you, some of the highlights of the last year, that in some ways, maybe we've forgotten about, because we're all so...this has become the new norm, we're a little numb to it.

I mean, I think a lot of people, and obviously, everyone from their various perspectives, is just over it, but let's look back at 2021.

- Over it, but figuring out what's next.

I think that, for me, was the main impression I came away from.

We started trying to emerge from the pandemic's isolation.

And I think at the start of 2021, we were really left with, "What else could happen next?"

If you consider the first few months of 2021, we not only were still dealing with the pandemic, but we had the Hernando de Soto Bridge, the main traffic artery across the river here, closed in February, I believe.

Closed for several months.

On top of that, we had the city's very first boil-water advisory, issued by Memphis Light, Gas and Water, for I think about a week's time.

And then, just for fun, in the middle of that, we had three to five inches of snow dumped on the city, and below freezing temperatures for a whole week.

- Yeah, it was quite a year.

I mean, I'll stay with COVID for a second with you, Daja.

You cover, primarily, education for us, and we'll talk some about colleges and so on, but primarily, I mean the biggest school system is SCS, obviously, then the suburban school systems, the whole network of private schools.

I mean, the school systems, nationally, internationally, but certainly, you know, we'll focus on Memphis, obviously, were the, for many people, the frontline of all the challenges of COVID.

Whether that was in, you know, the learning loss, and the difficulties of remote learning, that was primarily 2020, but carried over into 2021.

Some schools even talking about going back to virtual right now, you know, because of Omicron.

Talk about everything that happened with the schools, in a minute or less.

[Daja chuckles] - Yeah, Eric, it's been a very big year with a bunch of stuff going on, but basically, starting off, still having that option of remote learning.

So in March, the Shelby County Schools decided that- well, Shelby County Schools went back to in-person learning, with about a third of their students choosing to do that option.

And you really see, throughout this whole timeline of this past year, this kind of struggle between SCS, which is the largest public and urban school district in this state, and the conservative leadership.

And Governor Lee passing laws and legislation about virtual learning, mask mandates, and so on.

So, it's been back and forth, and in August, we see the full return to in-person learning amidst a surge in COVID cases.

So, it's been a big year of trying to kind of figure that out.

- We did, you and I, I believe we did a number of shows on education, talked to various education leaders.

And one of the more interesting was, not for anything I did, but for what you did, and what other people on the show did, was that there is- I mean, there's all these weird, I hate to call them "silver linings" in COVID, because it's been disastrous, and for a lot of people it's been extremely tragic.

So I don't want to make light of that, but there was a real increase in funding for schools in Tennessee.

And there's- I can't remember who we were talking to, it might've been leadership of SCS, talking about this opportunity to bring class sizes down dramatically, at the 1st through 3rd grade levels, to bring in a lot more teacher assistants, to do more tutoring.

I mean, your thoughts- that was kind of a remarkable conversation about things that I think the school system has wanted to do, for as long as I've been involved with covering the local school system here, or in other places, and suddenly they were able to do that, because of this increased funding.

- That's correct, yes.

This year, they had their biggest budget ever of $2 billion, more than $2 billion.

And a big chunk of that from the Federal Education Funding, the SF Funding, is a big chunk of that is on capital improvement as well.

Getting some buildings up-to-date, and we all- and they also had a bunch of mitigation strategies for reducing class sizes, and robust tutoring efforts, to kind of mitigate that learning loss, that's also coming along with COVID.

- Yeah, and some of them will say to you- I mean, some of that, much of that, came from the legislature.

There were three special sessions, which does call into question, the term "special", when you do three of them, 'cause they're supposed to be unique, but there were three- it was a crazy year, to be serious.

And there was a lot going on, we'll talk about what various special sessions addressed.

But there was a lot of, you know, the legislature asserting its will over cities across the state, but we'll focus on Memphis.

And that included, essentially, ending virtual school in practice, which was not what a lot of local charter schools, and certainly SCS leadership, really wanted.

But there was all this funding, and this increased funding.

And then there were these kind of demands that you can no longer move kids forward, from what, 2nd to 3rd grade, if they're not at a certain level, but it all gets to this legislative relationship.

And COVID, I mean, it's been this way as long as we've done this, I think, that the legislature, you know, a Red legislature in a largely Blue city, they are at odds sometimes, on dictating a lot of what happens to- you know, and a lot of people welcome that here.

And a lot of people fight that here.

Your thoughts on the legislature, COVID, et cetera.

- COVID in general, of course, I've had my eye on that, you know, since March 2020, a lot of folks have wanted to call '21, "2020, the Sequel", but it's not, it's been very different this year.

We started in January, where not everybody can get a vaccine, all adults could not get a vaccine, we finally lifted that.

Even in the beginning, you know, we knew that Shelby County was running out of 12,000 doses of the vaccine, we knew the number of the vaccines.

That's something we don't even think about anymore.

You can go to Walgreens, CVS, these things were really scarce.

We were- at the beginning of the year, we were still under "safer at home".

Everybody was still locked down.

Gyms and restaurants, those had capacity limitations on them, you know, so we started the year kind of the same as 2020.

But as it progressed, you know, vaccines became more readily available, everybody could get them.

There were still long lines at the Pipkin Building, just to kind of set the scene for the beginning.

And the rest of the year, really, was just kind of this rollercoaster ride of, you know, swells and dips in the number of cases that we saw.

And then, you know, in the summer, we saw the Delta surge, the Delta variant came along.

And what we knew about that, it was more transmissible than the original COVID virus, and it was deadly.

It really did...it sent a lot of people to the hospital, a lot of people died.

And if you look at the difference of the numbers, I just ran them the other day, in 2020, there were about 900 people in Shelby County that died of COVID.

And then in 2021, the number was around 1,800, for a total of about 2,700 people that have died due to COVID in Shelby County over this entire thing.

And so we saw Delta kind of, you know, start to fall off at the end of the year.

And then this Omicron variant came around.

And, of course, by this time, we're all just so weary of COVID, and everything that it comes with.

But you know, the early info out of South Africa, UK, other places, is that Omicron, it's not as harmful.

And maybe the wave won't last as long.

So this has really given people a lot of hope, that we're really, finally, actually seeing, maybe the end of- the light at the end of the tunnel.

But we'll still have to see, but, you know, over the year, we did fight a lot about vaccine mandates, that was coming from, you know, the Biden administration.

Mask mandates that was coming from our local health departments here.

And one of the special sessions in the legislature focused on those specifically.

They came back into session to approve the money for the Ford deal, which we'll probably talk about in a minute.

But they came in after that to say, "No, we're gonna focus only on COVID things."

And so, some of the big things that they did was they gave a lot of these powers, that reside with local health departments, to the governor, as far as mask mandates, you know, vaccines, and other things.

They stripped the local health departments of a lot of these powers.

And so I wrote down a quote from a guy here.

This is Representative Kevin Vaughan, he's a Republican from Collierville.

He was the one who carried the bill that essentially stripped the powers.

Here's how he explained it, he said, "You know how when you give a child a new puppy, "a child loves that puppy more than anything in the world.

"He or she picks it up, and is loving it to death, "and squeezes and squeezes, and that puppy start squealing.

"It gets uncomfortable, and it doesn't want anything "but to be put down, because it's getting loved to death.

And then it runs from the child from there on."

That's an actual quote from him in committee, that's basically saying these health departments love their people so much, but they're overstepping their bounds, and people need their space.

And that was one of the arguments that won the day, and allowed that bill to go through.

- Your thoughts, Bill, on...

I mean, we've talked a lot about the legislature, and how, you know, its relationship with Memphis, and Shelby County, and the suburbs.

And, you know, again, Memphis and the suburbs aren't always on the same page, in terms of what they want from the legislature.

Your thoughts about COVID, and then maybe we segue that into, I mean, crime, and the legislature's role in crime.

And some issues that they're gonna be tackling in this upcoming session, that will have huge impacts, locally.

- The political tumult from all of this, is what I think has surprised people.

Because if you just look on a limited historical basis, that things like the influenza epidemic 100 years ago, or the Yellow Fever epidemic here in 1878, you tend to look at the human toll.

But you tend to forget all of the political turmoil that accompanied those.

And we've certainly seen that here.

I mean, the director of the Shelby County Health Department resigned at the height of this, and was replaced, when the state basically took responsibility for the distribution of the vaccines away from the county health department.

- And essentially the city had to step in.

- And gave it to the City of Memphis.

It's hard to think that science can become a political issue, but it certainly has.

And there was really no place to go to escape it, because everybody is affected by this pandemic.

And if you didn't see the intersection of this before, certainly with the January 6th Capitol insurrection, we're taping one year to the day that that happened.

That would have been the wake up call that this outbreak, this public health problem, this worldwide pandemic, and the politics surrounding it, the political differences that were there, long before this pandemic, have intersected in a totally unique way.

And we're not out of the woods on that whole mix, even at this point.

- Well, again, crime, I think we agreed... COVID was the number one, two, and three stories of the last year, but certainly, the huge increase in crime was the next biggest story, I think, that we talked about, it was a national problem.

It was certainly here, I think, violent crime up some 25-plus percent.

You and I did a series of the show, Amy Weirich, the District Attorney.

We spent 22 of 26 minutes talking to Mayor Jim Strickland about crime.

We had Floyd Bonner on, the sheriff.

We had other people, Josh Spickler, who, from Just City, will be on next week, talking about crime.

'Cause obviously, it doesn't go away just because it's the new year.

We had hoped to have Chief Davis, the new police director on.

If anyone's listening, we still do want to have her on.

But she came in during this last year, the first police chief, in what, in 40 years, 30 years- - Thirty-eight years.

- who doesn't come from the MPD ranks, comes in, and is dealt a very difficult hand where the police department, and the city strategy, is to hire police.

And they've been pretty much stagnant, and unable to- they've hired police, but they've also lost police.

So they're stuck at about 1950, in terms of the number of police.

They've got a national surge in crime, some of it seems to be related to COVID, and the kind of- just all that dislocation, some of it's just where we are.

And now the legislature is gonna weigh in, in this upcoming session, on police residency questions.

And as we said, in all these shows we did over the course of the fall, and we've heard it before, all, in their various ways, the people with a part and piece of trying to fight crime, or stop crime or reduce crime.

All of them point to the legislature, saying the legislature and Amy Weirich, a Republican, you know, Jim Strickland, everybody will say that the state is not passing the laws that locals, many, many locals want, many local leadership want, to help reduce crime.

- Right, right, and the basic- you know, if you look back at this in about 10 years, and you look at the crime problem, what you'll remember is that we set a record for homicides in 2020; we broke that record in 2021.

That's the best illustration of the problem.

But we still have this lingering debate, locally, about what is the best strategy?

How much can you increase penalties, and keep people in prison longer?

And can you really speed up long-range approaches, like more wraparound services?

Can you speed that up enough to deal with the immediate problem that people are seeing, and experiencing with crime?

That discussion and that debate is very much alive here in Memphis.

It was alive before the pandemic, but the pandemic, as it's done with so many other issues, has really sharpened the focus, and brought that problem into plain view.

- Toby, your thoughts, you wrote about it, you covered it as well, I mean... - Just on crime, I think just, you know, just everyday people, they really feel there's a sense of lawlessness in Memphis.

They're seeing, you know, these people on the interstates driving recklessly, everybody kind of being crazy.

If you were out on New Year's Eve, you heard all the gunshots, at least from my house, you know, celebratory gunshots in the air.

You know, a lot of people are feeling kind of helpless right now.

I'm not saying that that's the reality, but that's the people that I've talked to, that's kind of how they're feeling about Memphis.

I know that MPD just went and talked to the City Council, this past week, about kind of reckless driving, and drag racing and all that, saying, "We're doing the best we can, we've got everything that we're out there doing."

The City Council said, "They're doing a great job."

And they were maybe debating whether or not to actually be able to take people's cars if they're doing this, whether that's gonna work or not, an extra penalty on top of that.

But I don't think anybody has the answer right now.

And I know that crime is elevated in every Metro across the city.

And we're gonna have to figure this out.

But you know, when it comes to the legislature, a lot of those people with power in the legislature, they're from rural areas, or they're from smaller towns.

Even Crossville, Tennessee, which is a small- that's where the Speaker of the House is from.

They don't have the same problems as Memphis does, where Nashville does.

And- but those are the ones with the power who were making these rules that affect urban areas.

And a lot of people just think they're out of touch.

- And it is interesting, I mean, I spent- you know, I have family and friends in New York, in the Seattle, Tacoma area, in Oakland, and LA.

And spent, you know, a lot of time talking to, and even visiting those, once I was vaccinated.

All of them say the same thing; that the folks in Portland, the folks in Seattle, the folks- I mean, that crime is way up, that they feel a sense of like, "What in the world is anyone gonna do about this, you know, in New York?"

I mean, it's just- it really is- we started at a really high level, and higher level than those, so ours got worse.

But really, everyone, it's not an excuse, it's just an interesting dynamic.

But from an education point of view, from the schools, how did that play out, I mean...?

- You know, we see a prime anecdotal example of how that's going.

In September, there was a shooting at Cummings K-8 School, which happened between 2 13-year-old boys.

And that was kind of a shock to the community.

The fact that that's happening in a school that also houses kindergartners.

So, we saw that play out on the prime stage in Memphis.

- And we talked with, again, I think with SCS leadership, about, you know, there was just a real- juvenile crime exploded nationally, locally.

And some of that would seem to be, anecdotally, I don't think it's proven out yet, but a lot of kids during virtual learning were not tuning in, they were not checking in, they were not getting on Zoom.

There was, you know, the level of sort of absence, delinquency, whatever it was.

I mean, it seemed to- I think we talked to some leadership who said, "Yeah, I mean, it was a bit of a problem," to say the least.

And I mean, I remember speaking with, I think we were still doing the show by Zoom, one of the heads of one of the charter school networks, saying, in the heart of this, this was probably the first quarter of, you know, of 2020, 2021.

She said, "My best students are struggling.

"So consider how, my kids who were already struggling before the pandemic, are doing," and clearly, to some degree, that played out in the crime numbers.

You had a thought?

Yeah, go ahead.

- Yeah, we have those anecdotal examples as well, and speaking with teachers, and talking about what struggles they have, and how many kids are tuning in.

And there's also the numbers of- we had a record breaking number of child gunshot victims, as well, this past year.

- Yeah, yeah, and everyone we spoke to, I mean, you can go back to WKNO.org, you can download the podcast of the show, all those folks I talked to, about in law enforcement and criminal justice, all of them pointed to the change in the gun laws as being a problem, that the carry- the gun violence is way up.

There are more guns out there, there are more illegal guns out there.

And that's not a judgment on it, it's just that all these law enforcement people from all stripes, were pointing it out through the fall, as we spoke to them.

We mentioned- we'll go to maybe better news.

And we mentioned Ford, Toby, a huge, huge announcement I'm still calling it the Memphis Megasite, I don't care what the legislature says.

It's been renamed to something that I can't remember.

The Memphis Megasite, you know, what, probably 30 minutes from where we sit, forty-five minutes from downtown, a $3.5 billion- I mean, it's more than that, it's really a $5.6 billion investment, by Ford and its partners.

Almost 6,000 jobs when it's up and running in 2025, as many as 27 to 30,000 construction jobs, a whole lot of suppliers that are gonna come in around the Ford plant, they're talking about, eventually, in a 25 to 30,000 ongoing jobs.

Nine hundred million dollars in state incentives that were approved in one of those special sessions we talked about.

I mean, it's just kind of a remarkable investment.

- If it weren't for COVID, this would be maybe the biggest story of the year, we would still be talking about it.

Daily Memphian has done a great job of really covering what happened to all the other towns that saw auto plants, and it's amazing.

Same thing's gonna happen in Haywood County, we'll feel ripple effects in Memphis, for sure.

I kind of looked down the road a little bit at these trucks, they're gonna build their F-series pickup truck there in Haywood County, probably in the next, what, like four or five years, I think, when it's finally built.

The SK Innovations Battery Plant will be there, these will be electric trucks.

The F-series truck has been the number one selling automobile in the world for the last 45 years.

Already, there are more than 200,000 people that have reserved these trucks online to get them.

So they weren't even being- when they start coming out, they're not gonna be on lots for the next year.

That's how much people want these trucks.

And when it's built, it's gonna be a lot of jobs.

It's a great news story.

And, you know, and I think it kind of appeased a lot of environmental people too, that, you know, "Yeah, we're gonna build this factory out there, but it's gonna-" you know, they're looking at this as clean energy, as kind of an alternative to combustion engines, and they want to save the world.

I mean, that's what Ford said, and they have this trend report they do every year, because they have a futurist, which I think is really cool, and the futurist said, "These trucks are gonna help save the planet."

- And a massive battery recycling facility, which is becoming a much bigger issue, as more and more electric vehicles, more and more electric this and that.

Bill, your thoughts on the Ford plant.

- Well, it's also been interesting, from a political perspective, because our two Republican Senators, Bill Haggerty and Marsha Blackburn.

Blackburn, in particular, has been talking about how the Biden administration is trying to dismantle the fossil fuel industry, and we can't let that happen.

While, meanwhile, Ford Motor Company, one of the most iconic American business brands, is taking the top-selling car model in the world, for some time now, and is going to convert them to electric vehicles.

That, to me, is really striking.

And to the point that Blackburn has actually opposed some of the tax credits attached to electric vehicles.

And, not to mention, the pending referendum that we're about to have on a constitutional amendment, to make Tennessee a right-to-work state.

At the announcement, which was done at Shelby Farms Park, of this, the President of the United Auto Workers Union was on the front row.

He wasn't on the stage with Ford executives, and with Governor Bill Lee, but he was in the front row.

And the Ford executives gave a shout-out to the UAW, who they believe will be their partner in this plant.

- You wanted to say something?

- I just wanted to add, I know I was saying, you know, this is gonna save the planet, and all those things.

There's still that matter of that big 35-mile long wastewater line that's gonna run into the Mississippi River, millions of gallons of waste that's gonna be run there.

So, you know, it doesn't come without its environmental downsides.

I'm gonna follow up on that in '22.

- Yeah, and that brings up another...

I mean, it could have been a, if not the biggest story, but a very big story last year, was the Byhalia Pipeline.

That was an oil pipeline that was gonna run through the heart of Memphis, and over the aquifer, at some very sensitive points through some, you know, predominantly black and brown, historically black and brown, neighborhoods.

And that was stopped, and it was a kind of environment... And it was an interesting thing, it wasn't just an environmental movement, it was a social justice movement.

There were a lot of, quietly, a lot of business people who said, "This is not the right time to do this, this is not..." The aquifer is actually a big point of economic development here, because we have this clean water that's... and we don't want to put that at risk.

We could have spent... You know, and we did a couple shows on it, I think, over the course of the year.

I want to come back, with just a couple of minutes left.

The other big thing this past year, Daja, and you covered all of it, and it's still kind of a work in progress, is four new presidents at colleges in Memphis.

U of M, David Rudd is retiring at the end of this year.

Rhodes, they have an... Oh, they have their permanent new president, who haven't gotten on the show yet.

CBU has an interim, and LeMoyne-Owen College has, maybe a year, time has no meaning anymore.

But thoughts on, essentially, the biggest four...

I mean, that excludes Southwest Community College, but other than that, the other four biggest schools with new presidents right now.

- Yeah, it's a big time for transition in upper... in higher learning.

And also, the University of Tennessee Health Science Center has a new- - Yes, thank you.

- chancellor as well.

So, it's a lot of big changes coming forth.

- Yeah, I think some of it has to speak to that...

I mean, we've interviewed a lot of these folks over the years, Bill, it's a difficult job.

Whatever you want to think of what these presidents do, you've got alumni, you've got boards, you've got parents, you've got students, the pressure of it, and then the pressure kind of exploding during COVID.

It seemed not coincidental with COVID, that so many were leaving, in different circumstances, without getting into the details of it.

- Right, and the goals take some time to accomplish.

You consider that when Shirley Raines was President of the University of Memphis, her goal, at that point, was to make the university a research institute, with all of the certifications associated with that.

Just in the last month, the university has gotten that certification.

- Yeah, a quick... Just a minute left, mentioned, Tom Lee Park is underway, I think you had brought this up, Bill has covered, there's a lawsuit that was filed just this past week, trying to derail some steps of it, but that project got underway.

And also the Greensward, talk about that for 30 seconds.

- Greensward, they were gonna build a parking deck over there on Prentiss Place.

They came back together, said it was gonna be too costly.

They decided to go with the original plan, which is gonna kind of renovate their parking lot there at the zoo, which is gonna take up some of the space at the Greensward, people were upset by it.

I explained that it's kind of like getting, you know, getting roller skates for Christmas, and somebody tells you you're gonna get an Xbox, and then you go back to the roller skates.

So a lot of people were disappointed, but they're gonna go ahead with this.

And I was reminded that this plan was the one that was approved by OPC and the zoo.

- Yes, yes, that's all the time we have, sorry, Toby, I cut you off there.

Thank you for joining us.

Get the full show at WKNO.org, or download the podcast.

We'll see you next week with Josh Spickler of Just City.

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