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- The Lakeland and Germantown school districts, 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 Jason Manuel, the Superintendent of the Germantown Municipal School District.

Thanks for being here again.

- Thanks for having me.

- Ted Horrell is Superintendent of the Lakeland School System.

Thanks for being here again.

- Great to be here.

Thank you.

- Along with Abigail Warren from The Daily Memphian.

We'll probably talk to more superintendents as we move towards the school year starting, but we got you all first, and we're really glad you're here.

You just went through budget season, and let's kind of start there, maybe not necessarily the dollars and cents of it, but what it says.

I think for both of you, you did, and again, I'm not gonna say everything's the same or everything's different, but just to start off, I think both of you were able to get raises for teachers and staff done.

You, in Lakeland, were able to do, I think it was a 4 or $5 million increase in your budget, which I'm curious about.

So you know, y'all are, I think 10 years from the deconsolidation and setting up the independent school districts.

What does this budget say about where you are, where you've been, and where you're going?

I'll start with you, Ted.

- Well, our situation's a little bit different because we're adding a grade level every year for each of the next two years, so when you see big increases like that, most of that probably reflects adding another 200 students, you know, per year, and the funds that come with those.

- And that's at the high school, you're adding 10th next year?

- Adding 11th next year.

So our 10th will become our 11th grade next year, so, you know, additional personnel, support staff, everything else.

But certainly what you said, I think the main priority, and for us, this was a year that we could finally do that 'cause we've got the economy of scale to kind of do it, really make that major investment in teacher salaries and get ahead of the requirement to get teachers to a minimum $50,000 starting salary per year.

- And that's a state requirement that was passed this last legislative session, or prior?

- I think it was two years ago, but it goes into effect the next budget year.

And I know Germantown-- - We're ahead of the game.

- Yeah, and for you, I mean, again, you all are in it, I guess we get to the 3Gs question and that kind of lingering, what has been a challenge to put it lightly, but talk about where you are in this budget season and, you know, again, where you've been over the last 10 years, where you're going.

And again, talk about the 3Gs and the state of them.

- Sure.

Well, I think we had challenges that some of the other school districts didn't have from the start.

So right off the bat, three of the buildings, Germantown Elementary, Germantown Middle, Germantown High School, didn't come to the Germantown Municipal School District.

We were receiving students, but not the buildings in that case.

So for us, one of the challenges we had, we didn't have reserves.

And if you think about the cash flow for school districts, a lot of our funding, about 50% of our funding comes from property taxes and people pay those typically December to February is when people are paying those.

And what you see in the bank account in school districts, our money continually drops, drops, drops, drops, drops until those property taxes hit the bank account.

So we have to have reserves in order to have the cash flow for school districts.

So that was an early challenge for all the school districts.

And a lot of us had revenue anticipatory notes or we had loans from our cities in order to do that.

So we all had to build reserves to do that.

So I think it's good that all the school districts have built strong reserves in order to provide for that cash flow.

But then specifically, for us now, we are making investments around our strategic plan and making sure we're accomplishing those goals.

- And again, before we go to Abigail, the state of the three schools, those three schools we call the 3Gs stayed with Shelby County Schools, now Memphis-Shelby County Schools, there's been a lot of negotiations.

Update everyone on the status of each of those schools.

- So that situation is settled as far as Germantown Schools.

So there's a transition plan for those facilities.

So for Germantown High School, Shelby County Schools has the right to settle that property.

What they were doing, and it wasn't consistent with state law, was they were educating students from Cordova area and they were using buildings within our municipality district.

So they weren't Germantown residents or majority Germantown residents that were attending those schools.

So what is happening now is, I think Shelby County is working a situation where they're gonna sell Germantown High School's property, and they're gonna use those funds to help with the school they're building in Cordova that's gonna serve the students that were attending Germantown High School.

For the Germantown Elementary and Middle, there's a slower transition for those.

It's a 10-year period that they have in order to move those students.

Once again, those students were not Germantown students, those students were living in other areas and they were bringing those students into those facilities.

So that'll transition over buildings.

But as far as us, all the physical students, residents of Germantown are attending our schools.

- Let me go to Abigail.

- Because it's been 10 years since the municipal school started, can you talk a little bit, and y'all may wanna bounce off each other, how the county got from two districts to one district to seven, being six in the county.

Can one of you recap, 'cause y'all lived it.

- Is this a special two-hour edition of Behind the Headlines?

[everyone laughs] I think, most notable but a lot of people probably take for granted at this point, there were two systems.

Jason and I were both part of what we now call legacy Shelby County Schools.

Memphis City Schools was the other system.

It gave up its charter.

So we had 1 year, the '13-'14 school year where we were all one district and then the next year, we were seven districts.

So the six municipal systems, and then the remaining new Shelby County Schools, which is now Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

So, we had about six months to kind of set up the new municipal school system.

So we went from two to one to seven in three years.

- And where in there was the election that was ruled, not official, for lack of a better term, and then the other one?

- So that was before that merged year of '13-'14.

So we thought that we were going to be able to open schools and it was gonna happen that '13-'14 year but that's when they had to go back to the drawing board.

And there was new legislation that was passed that changed the way it was written.

So that's why they merged year happened.

- And was that helpful in some way, setting up the school district?

Because, considering the attorney said it wasn't, or the judge said it wasn't official, that you didn't have to necessarily abide by sunshine laws and things of that nature as you were trying to get policies and trying to do the groundwork.

- I don't know.

It's hard to have that... Look back and... - Well, practically, all of that had to happen twice before we were even named our position.

So I think there was some certainly policy work that was worked out by the boards before we came on board, but for the most part, from the day we were named and started, which most of us was, you know, January 1st, 2013, we had 6 months.

- So we still had six months of compressed timeframe to build our school districts and we relied heavily on each other to do so.

So I don't know if it was necessarily helpful.

I think there were some things that weren't helpful.

You had a lot of challenges because when we were dealing with staff moving from one system to another, how do we transfer over data?

How do we transfer over, when you think about how teachers are paid over the summertime, or administration.

We had a lot of issues that developed because of that, that we had to work through legally.

- All these years later, I'm gonna assume you're happy that you did it, that you don't regret it and that the boards and so on, but are you where you thought you would be?

I'll go with you first, Ted.

Is this what you expected, give or take 10 years?

- If you'd asked me 10 years ago if I thought we would have our own middle and high school both fully built out, I would've said no, that's too compressed.

I mean, it's a pretty quick turnaround to go from 1 school with 820 students in 2014, and then 10 years later, we're about to have a junior class.

It's just a lot of construction.

It's a lot of financial issues.

So more than most, a lot of our attention and energy has been focused on just having the complete K-12 system.

So we're a bit ahead of schedule, in my mind, in that regard.

- I'll say yes and no.

I would say what you're looking at here are two of the highest achieving districts in the state of Tennessee, and we continually set the bar.

So we know that efficiency is different when we have smaller school systems.

There's a joke, and I think you're the one who tells me, like, how do we make decisions in Germantown?

We'll have three town halls, two committee meetings, and then we'll decide as a school board.

It's funny, but it's also something special that really defines us and defines both of our districts.

When we think about how do we make decisions, how do we move towards what our communities want?

There's a voice, there's a way for our communities to really define, and you're talking about programming.

You're talking about how are you building your buildings.

When I think about what y'all did to design that, it's incredible.

- Let me shift to some of the more immediate issues.

And one is absenteeism, what we used to call truancy, which is a national, I don't know, some would say a tragedy.

It's a national phenomenon.

It is not unique to your school districts, to Memphis school districts.

I think nationally, it's been pre-COVID to now, the rate of chronic absenteeism was about 15% nationally.

It's almost 30% now.

Germantown, I think the numbers the state put out, this is from '18-'19 to '22, '23, from 3 1/2 to nine percent of students in Lakeland, four and a half to 7.5.

Shelby County Schools went from 18 to 30.

DeSoto went from 8 to 28.

Statewide, it went from 13% to 20%.

A lot of numbers, and not to target y'all.

Clearly, it was COVID, but there's more to it because we're a bit past COVID and these rates are still relatively high.

So I'll start with you, Jason.

What happened?

What are you doing?

Why does it happen?

What do you hear from students?

And again, I should probably say chronic absenteeism is considered missing 10% of the school days.

So, give or take 18 days, 18 to 20 days.

- So for us, we did see a change in how students and families view school attendance and just the drive to get there.

So it has been a challenge for us.

We have a truancy officer that works with families.

We have social workers that work with families to try to remove those barriers for students to come to school.

So it's something that we always have to work with.

We've also had to play with our exam exemption policy, and we just changed it again this past week.

So when we look at that motivation for students to come to school, there was a time at the high school where we thought, "Hey, the only reason you're gonna be "exempt from an exam is if you're doing well in that class and you're making an A in that class."

In the past, we used to have a carrot of, "And if you have good attendance, that's also a component too."

We removed that cap and we saw the attendance rates dramatically increase when we took away the attendance piece.

And so now we have slowly been removing it.

And during COVID, it was higher, but now we are back to five days to be exempt from exams 'cause we have to have those pieces in place to get those students to school.

- When you talk about the truancy officers and working with families and students, what are those...

I'm not asking for any specifics, names or anything like that, but what do families say that they maybe didn't say before COVID?

- I think everything's different.

It's just a view of how they're dealing with school.

But you're talking about different families having different challenges and different needs.

So they may be working through loss of a job.

They may be working through a chronic disease of a family member.

And so a lot of what we do is putting people in connection with resources.

And that's what our social workers do to make sure they're getting those supports.

- Same questions to you.

- I agree that I think it's a myriad of challenges.

I mean, sometimes it's just economic challenges.

Somebody's in a situation where they just can't get the child to and from school because of, you know, whatever reason.

I do think during COVID, it became not only acceptable, but kind of preferred for people to say, "If I've got the sniffles, I'm not sending my kid to school on these days."

And so you put a few of these things together, or maybe they're participating in an athletic team that travels and so they're gonna take an extra day here or there.

And you add all these things up and I think you end up potentially with higher rates.

- As an educator, does some of it drive you nuts?

I mean, I'm not taking away from the legitimate excuses.

But that kind of increase, a lot of those things you're talking about existed before COVID.

So does it frustrate teachers?

Is there more understanding?

I mean, what is the reaction to it?

- I think when you dig into it, you find, very frankly, understandable human stories.

And again, they're all in such different categories.

I think for the most part, our students and our parents want kids to be in school and they do just about everything they can to get them there.

There's not a situation where I say, "Well, they're working the system or they're abusing it or they don't wanna be there."

I just think it's a number of things.

- Abigail.

- Jason, you've probably touched on yours a little bit, but for both of you, the biggest challenge of the last 10 years undoubtedly was COVID, the pandemic, shutting down schools.

But apart from that, what has been your biggest challenge in the last 10 years?

- Ooh.

We've had multiple.

Like I said, I think at the beginning, financially, how do we build that reserve and move carefully?

One of the challenges we've all faced is OPEB.

And I remember having it and I was like, "OPEB, what is OPEB?"

And I sat in a meeting and they're like, "You've got an OPEB problem."

And I was like, "Yes, we do."

And I had to go look up what OPEB was.

It's other post-employment benefits.

So Shelby County had a policy where if you worked for the system and you retired, you got health benefits in retirement.

And so that is a growing snowball.

And as a district, I think we all worked to close that door so that we didn't have that growing payment.

So how do we financially provide for those?

And cities deal with this too.

How do you provide for those retirement benefits that, every year, you have more and more people that are retiring and the amount grows and grows.

So we had to move carefully with that.

The biggest challenge I think for us was the zoning.

The three Germantown schools, we have rezoned twice as a school district in a 10-year period and you'll have school districts that don't rezone for 20 years.

That has been a big challenge for us.

And how do we do that, and like I said, and get the community buy-in so that they understand where we drew those.

- I think most of where we've spent our time or a great deal of it has been on facilities in Lakeland School System.

Again, building two, you know, massive schools within, you know, the first few years of being open is a big deal.

I'll also say though that, and I know Jason would agree, I think increasingly, we're getting additional requirements, restrictions, regulations handed down to us from the state legislature.

I know that's happening nationally as well, but the targets kind of tend to change, the marks change.

You're constantly having to update or adapt policies maybe that you didn't expect to.

And it actually does take a lot of time and energy to make sure that you're in compliance with state law and doing what you need to do there.

But also making sure your eye is on that prize of child benefit in every situation.

So balancing those things can be a challenge.

- Talk about zoning.

we talked about students, I mean, Germantown is unique and that had the legacy schools staying within the city limits.

I don't have kids in the schools anymore, so I'm confused by this.

There's a way in which people from out of your districts can attend, I believe, Germantown schools, I think Lakeland, I'm not sure.

- Not Lakeland.

- Not Lakeland, yeah.

Some of the other school districts do this.

So I'll just focus on you, Jason.

Where they pay a fee if they're not a resident.

How does that whole process work and what's the thinking?

- What's defined by state law, and this will be our first year that we're getting ready to charge tuition as a school district.

So it's based on the amount that the city is providing through property taxes.

So what they do is they do a calculation of all the property taxes and it's the equivalent of 15 cents for every a hundred dollars in that property tax.

So it's an amount that they calculate and they have to provide.

So all the municipals have that component.

The way you have to calculate the tuition is you take your number of students and you divide by that number and that's what you come up with.

- Which is give or take what in Germantown?

- So we have $500 for the year.

- Okay, so, I could have, give or take, I could have a child living the heart of Memphis, I could live in Bartlett, I could live in Lakeland.

I could apply to get there?

- Yes.

So the way we do it, it's not necessarily an application.

You put your name in and it's a lottery that you would draw.

But we do it based on space.

So we look at grade levels, we look at how much space that we have for those.

And every year, we have optimal capacity in our classroom.

So we try to be less than the state numbers.

And we are less than the state numbers of teacher-student ratio and then we do a calculation to determine that.

A lot of ours are employees' children that are attending our schools.

We also have City of Germantown employees are allowed to come too, so that's a lot of our transfers too.

- And you allow City of Germantown employees and GMSD employees' children to go for free, correct?

- Yes.

Without tuition.

- I gotcha, gotcha.

Was that a state law you welcomed?

Or one that you're like, "Well, that handed something to us."

- It's not required.

Yes.

- It allowed it.

- It allows it.

Yes.

It sets limits on what they can do, yes.

- Okay.

And you all have opted out of that?

- We have, when we started, we just didn't have extra room.

I mean, we were busting at the seams.

And so when we began the system and contemplated if we were gonna have open enrollment, we decided not to and have just kind of carried forward with that.

All of our master planning has been based on projected enrollment in Lakeland.

So basically, in Lakeland School System, you either have to live in Lakeland or we do also allow our employees of the school system in the city to send their students for free.

- Before, I should note, we have about eight minutes left in the show and we will be trying to get other superintendents from the suburban school districts on in the coming weeks or months.

And we've been trying to get the new superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools on.

We thought we had her, they've had to cancel three, four or five times.

We're not quite sure yet, but we are trying to get them on.

And hoping the staff can get that scheduled and keep to it.

So let me go to Abigail.

- Speaking of the legislature, they came out with a law that allows, but doesn't require teachers to be armed.

How are each of your school districts handling that?

- So I think this is something that each district has to look at.

So know that the state law prescribes that you have to have a joint agreement between the principal of the school, the superintendent, and local law enforcement.

I think for some school systems, that may be a good thing.

If you look at the rate, the time it takes for officers to get to the school, and they may not have school resource officers in their buildings.

That may be a need for some school systems to have that.

We are very thankful for our partnership with the City of Germantown and we have SROs in each of our school buildings.

We also have a floating detective that goes around to all of our buildings, and so they are armed.

And so we don't have the need at this time to do that.

It's not something that we would close the door on, but at this time, we don't have that need.

- We don't have our own municipal police department so we partner with the Shelby County Sheriff's Department.

Sheriff Bonner has said he does not support having employees with firearms in school.

So that really closes the door for us.

We do have armed Shelby County Sheriff's deputies, two of them.

At Lakeland Preparatory School we have our own security guard, at Lakeland Elementary School, who is armed.

He's a former Shelby County Sheriff's lieutenant.

So we feel like we've got a very, very good situation in terms of securing our building and our students.

- All this comes out of many things, I mean, but one is just mass shootings at schools, and you know, it's about 10 years since Sandy Hook, the first kids who were young there, the mass shooting where 28 people were killed at Sandy Hook in Connecticut have graduated from high school.

I heard some interviews with them recently and it was just...

It's amazing that 10 years have gone by.

I mean, you all have been educators before you were superintendents, right?

I mean, you've been educators forever.

The change of when I was in, you know, elementary, middle, and high school to when you all started to just even in the last 10 years, beyond this arming teachers or arming staff, what other changes have you had to pursue?

- Well, I think, I mean, it starts with a mindset change.

I mean the mindset is: This could happen.

And so when you look at different situations in your school or you look at the facilities planning, for example, or you look at, you know, assemblies or athletics or anything like that, it's not the, you know, hopefully not the main thing you think about every day, but it has to be something you think about and we work carefully with our partners in both the fire department, the sheriff's department, and Homeland Security and the State of Tennessee, Department of Education just to make sure.

The question's always: Are we doing everything that we can?

And we try to keep up with best practices and feel like that's what we're doing.

- So for us, and it's a new requirement for new construction that you have bullet-resistant glass.

So we have bullet-resistant glass in all of our buildings now.

Like I said, we do training with our staff on that.

We train with paramedics also and the SWAT team so that they learn tourniquets and battlefield because when the police come to sweep the building, you have to think about who's doing the lifesaving procedures.

It's not the police, they're trying to deal with the threat.

So we do extensive training with our staff too.

The SROs in each of our buildings is a key piece for us.

And then reunification, making that plan for, if you have an event like this, where are you relocating to?

So we all have extensive plans that we work with.

- I mean, there's no argument with any of that.

I don't think anyone listening shouldn't do those and have to those.

But is there a way in which we sort of normalized this?

I mean, I can remember Columbine, you know, in my lifetime, was one of the first big... And now it is, I think anyone would say, way too frequent.

And also, how do the kids respond?

The young kids, the older kids?

The older kids have lived with this their whole life.

They've seen it on TV, they've seen it on social media.

I mean, what's the emotional side of this?

- I think that's a great question.

I don't know that I have the expertise to say, you know, their emotional impact.

I do know that students from a young age now have to be aware because we have drills that are required and that are necessary to make sure that, if the, you know, unthinkable happens, that everybody's prepared.

So there is, again, there is a mindset shift is the main thing.

- Thoughts on that.

- Yeah, I think we have to be prepared.

And so that's the promise, not like we're desensitized.

It's like everyone knows that your worst nightmare could happen as a leader in a school, as a teacher in a school working with children and I think that's the fear.

And every time it happens, it's a case study of unfortunately, "Oh, what could have been done better in this situation?"

And we're all looking to those events, unfortunately, to see how we can improve our safety.

- A couple minutes left here, Abigail.

- I know this is kind of a hard question, but if you had a crystal ball and could foresee what your biggest challenge is in the next 10 years, what do you think that is?

- We are playing catch-up for facilities now at Houston High School.

So we have a Houston High School master plan.

That building was built in late '80s and so that's something that we are looking for funding from our municipality in order to help us make sure that we're keeping up with the incredible facilities that you see in other school districts.

But that's something that we need to work on so that we're providing the classroom space, the lab space, because how we teach has changed.

- Similar to the last part, we're always concerned and trying to look ahead on facilities 'cause it's likely that we may need another one, certainly within 10 years, but students are different.

The way they learn is different, their needs are different.

So we're constantly trying to adapt to that and everything from our schedule to our curriculum to our technology, certainly AI comes into play.

You know, what is it that the kids need to know that we didn't know they needed to know even two years ago when it comes to AI?

- Last question.

We could do a whole show on this.

Vouchers, the governor's big massive voucher program did not pass the legislature this past session.

It is pretty clear it's gonna come back.

Each of you, you support or you are opposed to the voucher.

Yeah.

The opposed to it, and why?

- We believe and have stated very strongly that we think public dollars should go to public schools.

And beyond that, we think that if dollars are going to different schools, then they all need to be held to the same expectations and accountability.

That's not what the proposals say.

And I don't feel like the voucher program strengthens public schools.

And I have to believe public schools are a bedrock of, you know, our nation.

And it's important to cause them to be as strong as they can be.

- So I'm strongly, deeply opposed to vouchers.

Every year since I've been a superintendent, we've added 50 laws on the books every year and they don't go away.

You talk about the accountability, you talk about the things, the limits around: How long do you have to teach math?

How long do you have to teach English?

How many hours of PE are you getting?

Student-teacher ratios, what exactly are you teaching in the standards?

We don't have that flexibility.

And if the goal is to provide options for families to do that, take the handcuffs off of us.

Let us have a little more flexibility because we are high-achieving school districts.

Let us have those options.

If you think that parents need to have something different, why are you building such a tight box for public school systems?

And also too, if the goal is to provide for students' choice, that choice exists and you should have other options.

We have charter schools, we take transfers for students.

- All right.

Again, we may do a whole other show on that.

But thank you both for being here.

Appreciate it.

Thank you, Abigail.

Again, coming in the next few weeks, we've got Juvenile Judge Tarik Sugarmon we've got the interim president of CBU.

We've got State Senator Brent Taylor and Josh Spickler from Just City coming on talking about some of the criminal justice reforms.

And we're hoping to have the new superintendent in Memphis-Shelby County School sometime sooner than later.

Thanks very much.

If you missed any of the episode, you can get it online at wkno.org or wherever you get your podcasts.

We'll see you next week.

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