- (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.

- Interim Superintendent Roderick Richmond tonight, on Behind the Headlines.

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

Thanks for joining us.

I'm joined tonight by Roderick Richmond.

He's the interim superintendent for Memphis-Shelby County Schools.

Thanks for being here.

- Thank you.

Thank you all for the invitation.

- Absolutely.

Along with Laura Testino, reporter with The Daily Memphian.

I think we're going into our, I can't believe it, it's been a little over 15 years and many of the shows, probably one of the highest percentage of topics we've talked about is the schools, the merger, the demerger.

As part of that, I'll say, I was doing the math and Laura had to help me, I think we've had seven or so, six or seven superintendents and interim superintendents on the show over that 15-year period, which shows this is not a job that in general, statistically people stay in for very long.

Your predecessor, obviously, you know, just nine months and other, it's been a rough five, six years.

You've been with the district for your whole-- - Thirty-two.

- Thirty-two years.

What do you bring to the job and how do you, as interim, you're halfway through your 18-month interim piece here, how do you bring stability to this job and how do you manage with, again, we've got state issues we'll talk about, we've got board changes we'll talk about, how do you manage this job with all of that backdrop?

- Well, I think you mentioned that when you spoke of the merger, I've been here for 32 years, so one thing I bring is the historical context.

I was chair of the merger, so going through Memphis-Shelby County Schools when we merged, I was chair of the merger, and so one thing I understand is I understand the historical context of both Memphis City as well as Shelby County Schools.

I understand this community because I've been in it all of my life.

I also bring credibility.

You get credibility one or two ways, either through experiences or relationships, and I'd like to think that my team and I have truly steadied the ship over the past 11 months.

- Your goals, I mean, you're halfway through.

Talk broad picture, big picture about the goals you've had in this 9 months, 10 months now, and then, you know, in the remaining part of your interim term here.

- Yes, sir.

So one of the goals, first of all, was to steady the ship.

The next thing was to try to bring trust back, trust and transparency back to the district, and another thing was to put the focus back on the students.

But outside of that, under my 100-day plan, I wanted to focus on governance and board relationships, and so I started to ensure that we had good relationships with our board, we were governing appropriately, we were conducting our committee meetings, our work sessions, as well as our board meetings in a way that showed the public that they could trust us and that we were what you would call a team of 10.

We also focused on academics, and so academics, we focused on what we would call our five A's, academics, attendance, attitude, athletics, and arts, because again, we wanted the focus to be on our students.

We also focused on staff relations at capacity.

I think I have a great relationship with my cabinet, central office, teachers, as well as the general public.

I tried to get out and to meet with all of our employees.

I tried to interface with those employees so that they would know that they had someone that they could trust who truly cared about them.

We also wanted to look at operations and finance, community engagement, and last but not least, accountability.

- Yeah, and before I go to Laura, I should note we're taping this a week before it'll air because I believe it is the Ken Burns documentary, you may have heard of the documentary, so this is one week delayed in terms of when it airs.

But let me bring in Laura.

- Sure.

One of the most specific metrics that you've looked at that's been a struggle for superintendents at Memphis and across the country has been chronic absenteeism.

Your team presented data that shows that you're trending toward the five percentage point drop that you want to hit.

Are you confident that that will stay through the end of the year after last year hitting a high of 31% of students chronically absent?

- Yes, we are extremely hopeful.

We started out this year with doing what was called showing up for greatness, where we canvassed the neighborhoods to knock on doors, to encourage students who hadn't registered yet to register.

We've continued to do that even throughout the school year.

We also have approximately 75 attendance liaisons, and we are asking those individuals to reach out to parents and families each and every day to ask and to see why students aren't showing up for school.

- How is that role different than attendance roles that might have been similar in the past?

- We're making data-driven decisions, and so we're meeting with them frequently.

We're telling them that, again, under accountability, we're looking at what is the return on investment when it comes to hiring 75 attendance liaisons.

And so, we're asking them, "Look at the data, ask yourself, why aren't these students coming to school?"

But more importantly, we want to be good stewards of the resources, and one of those things is looking at, are we getting a return on investment when it comes to this role?

But also providing the support and professional development necessary for those individuals to do their jobs and to do their jobs well.

So putting those structures in place, I think we've been able to do that well.

That department is headed up by Stacy Davis, and I'd like to think that she, along with her team and those attendance liaisons are doing a great job, but more importantly, we have to do things that don't cause us to hurt ourselves.

And so, we're also looking at what are some of the exclusionary practices that we're doing when it comes to suspending students, for example, and is that or is that not contributing to our chronic absentee problem as well?

- Okay, one of the other related to attendance is enrollment.

The district has experienced a loss of an estimated 2,000 students in its traditional schools while charter school enrollment has remained steady and more students have started enrolling in vouchers, at least with Memphis addresses, how is your team approaching that decline and what are you attributing it to?

- Well, if you, again, I know the historical context of Memphis, you can probably go back almost 15 to 20 years and you'll be able to see that that was one of the areas throughout the past 20, 25 years of having this in-out migration of anywhere from 2,000 to 3,000 students.

However, I think we have to do a better job of marketing our district as a district of choice, again, which is the reason why I'm wanting us to focus on the five A's.

I've challenged our principals and staff to make our schools and our district a place that people escape to rather than from.

- The state obviously came close to putting a board, essentially a takeover of putting an oversight board above the school system last year.

It looks likely that that could happen next year if various differences in the two bills didn't quite get reconciled or done, it's not guaranteed.

Do you watch that with fear, with trepidation, or you just ignore it?

I mean, how do you operate when there's this huge, what some would view as a threat and then also this potential huge change in the terms of the existing board members?

- Yes, sir.

Well, I'm asking my team as well as our principals and our teachers to not be distracted.

I think one of the most important things we can do is to not deal in hypotheticals, but to just stay focused on the work, which is first and foremost improving outcomes for our students.

- We talked about charters.

There's been a lot of charters and a lot of different types of charters, right?

There was the ASD system that was hiring charters.

All charters are not the same, right?

No schools, all schools are not the same, but in your time in the district and certainly in the administration, have charters overall been a net good for education in Memphis?

- I think like with any of our schools, we have good charters as well as good traditional schools.

What our challenge is is to ensure that all of our schools are improving and addressing the needs of our students.

I recently met with Terrence Patterson from the Memphis Education Fund, and one thing I've wanted to do as a superintendent is to truly manage our portfolio district, but with that portfolio district, we want all of our schools to be high achieving.

He and I had that discussion as we start talking about right-sizing this entire district of choice.

- One more before I go to Laura that's on that theme, one thing that you'll hear parents and teachers and administrators, we've had lots of charter folks on, is they feel closer to their families, to the students, to the parents.

They have these more like small town-esque sort of connections versus the big district.

You've talked about breaking and another thing that's related to that is during the merger and demerger, sometimes people forget the suburban schools was one school district and now it's six.

They do a lot together, but they have all said, I think either at the show or elsewhere, that they feel like they actually are better now because they are a smaller, Germantown is a smaller district, Collierville is a smaller district, et cetera, and they're closer to their parents, closer to their students, closer to the people who pay the bills.

You've talked about, I mean, dividing Memphis-Shelby County Schools into four districts.

I mean, we had a very quick conversation with Brent Taylor and Mark White two months ago, I can't remember, where they kind of half jokingly but half seriously talked about, do you need to break up Memphis-Shelby County Schools, not simply to make it closer to the parents, closer to the neighborhoods, closer to the people and constituents.

Talk about all that.

That's a lot I threw at you, but that whole notion of getting closer to the parents and students and the sheer size of the school system and the challenges that creates.

- Yeah.

When we went through the merger, we had what was called multiple achievement paths to autonomy, and during the merger we had five geographical regions, pretty much with the old Shelby County Schools being our fifth region, which was the east region.

Under Memphis City Schools, we had a northwest, southwest, southeast, northeast.

What we have done this year is we've returned to regionalization.

So that's the other thing that I'm excited about and proud that under my administration we've been able to do is to return back to regionalization.

And what that allows for is equity and access, that allows us to tailor supports to varying communities because we know across our portfolio there's different needs for those varying communities, and our communities are vastly different.

When we look about, if we drew a line down the middle and we looked at the east side of our county, when it comes to socioeconomics, it's not as challenging in the east as it is on the west side of our county.

When we look at houselessness, most of our houseless parents are in the northwest and southwest.

When we look at building utilization, most of our buildings on the east side are at utilization rates where the ones that are on the west side, which used to be the old center core of the city are our buildings that are underutilized, but also have what you would call high-facility condition indexes.

- Let's talk a little bit more about the buildings.

As first kind of preview of a long-term plan, your administration has proposed closing five schools to Memphis-Shelby County School students.

I'd like to focus this question on the two schools that are closed in Frayser.

Because those are the ones that will result in changing the attendance zones of families.

One of the things that you've said you've wanted to do is improve feeder patterns so that families based off of their neighborhood can have more access to better programming in their own neighborhood school rather than having to make the choice to go somewhere else.

How are you thinking about what those two closure proposals in Frayser may indicate about what's coming in a later plan for attendance rezoning, for new programming, or for choice of other schools that may be in that area?

- Yeah, great question.

So the closures in Frayser are, I would just like to say the proposals for right-sizing and repurposing those schools, first of all, we know under legislation we have to give Lucy to Millington.

Okay, so in taking that into consideration, what we want to do is to go ahead now and start to right-size so we can do it one time and not have to be making several changes.

Again, we want to stabilize the district.

- And just so for people who are watching that don't know the legislation you're talking about, that's the three G's, or what was known as the three G's legislation that schools in municipal zip codes have to go back to that municipality.

- Have to go back to that municipality, and so Lucy sits in the Millington municipality, and so those, that's a K8 school, and so we're looking at those students possibly being reassigned to Woodstock.

In terms of Georgian Hills Elementary and Frayser-Corning, both of those schools have what you call high FCIs.

Okay, and so high FCIs, and for example, it may cost us $3 million for a HVAC system.

When we go and appraise that building, it may be only worth $1.2 million.

So we're also looking at, as we do capital improvement and deferred maintenance in some of these schools, is it intelligent?

Is it smart for us to invest in a school that we know long-term is going to cost us more money than investing in it?

Also, with the new bill, with the Frayser new bill, we are also trying to, again, right-size that community so that we can shore up those feeder patterns and we can provide quality, highly-effective teachers to start to prepare those students who will eventually feed into that new Frayser.

So it's part of helping to right-size, but also to shore up the footprint in that what you would call Frayser corridor.

- And, you know, one thing that some critics of the district in the recent years have had issue with is the district may choose to right-size, may choose to make the difficult decision to close schools, but then don't make a choice about what happens to the building.

What will be different about the way that your administration interacts with vacant properties?

- Yeah, that's a great question again.

One of the reasons I met with Memphis Education Fund was for us to start to have the conversation around, traditionally when we've repurposed a school, in some instances, we've allowed charters to backfill.

We can't continue to allow charters to backfill if we're saying based on economies of scale, we should repurpose this particular school because we know we need to have less schools.

Those economies of scale are not only going to help our traditional school district, but they're going to also help the charters.

One reason is when it comes to human capital, we're stretching our human capital too thin because of the number of schools we have across the portfolio.

- And is that just teachers, or in addition to teachers?

- It's mainly teachers, but it's because when you start to look at charters as well as our traditional schools, we have all of these layers, and so, how do we flatten our organization more to have more of our quality effective educators in the classroom?

We can't do this work without having highly effective teachers in every classroom.

So to answer your question, the other thing is working with the community to look at how do we repurpose buildings?

How do we look at, if we have a school and let's say we decide to demolish it, how do we work across our governmental entities or with people in the community to repurpose that land, either for let's say a Hospitality Hub, or let's say affordable housing.

How do we do that so that we can revive many of these communities that we know they no longer have the density that they may have had 40 or 50 years ago?

- One thing, I may talk about charters in these schools, we have about 10 minutes left in show here.

You talked about not, I may have misheard you, not wanting charters to go into some of these schools that are empty.

If a charter operator came forward, let's say it's got a proven track record, it's got money, are you saying you still wouldn't want them into these buildings or- - No, not that we wouldn't want them.

If we have a building that we're not using and the building is in good shape, we're not saying that.

What I'm saying is we all have to be around the table so that we can start to partner and look at where is that first, a need, how to charters help us where there's a need in our community.

But also if we are trying to right-size the district and we are trying to do some of this difficult work, what I wouldn't want to do is to say we're going to repurpose a school and reassign students to another school saying that we're going to provide more appropriate programming for those students by moving them to this school.

- Gotcha.

- Just to allow a charter to backfill it, and then if I'm a student or a parent, I'm gonna send my child to that school because it's still within my community.

And so what I'm saying is we have to be more collaborative around our portfolio district to ensure that we're all taking these things into consideration.

- There's one Laura's written extensively about, if you haven't read on Daily Memphian about the facilities and the deferred maintenance, there's a database, and so on.

You should look up Laura's name on Daily Memphian if you're interested in this stuff.

One thing that you highlighted and others have, but Laura highlighted in Daily Memphian, was the Bayer building on Jackson.

The drug Bayer, B-A-Y-E-R.

And it was sold, the board bought it in for about $6 million in 2018.

They put about $33 million into it to make an administrative building and to save money, and they just now sold it for $5 million.

Obviously, the math on that is not what anyone wants, right?

And I'm sure taxpayers are saying, "Wait, let me just do that.

All that money was wasted."

How do you avoid going forward as all these buildings are being assessed and/or sold or repurposed or laying dormant, how do you avoid that kind of financial, I mean, mismanagement by the district?

- Yes, sir.

Well, we had to make a really tough decision about what the impact would be long term, and if we had kept that building this year, we were gonna have to invest, I wanna say about seven more million dollars in it.

And I think even though it may have first been reported, it was gonna be a return of about five million.

I think long term is gonna be eight million, but we had to make the tough decision to sell it because long term we were gonna have to invest approximately $150 million in that building.

- But, okay, that's good to know, I'm glad I didn't totally interrupt you, but now I'm gonna interrupt you and say, before I go back to Laura, but do you look back, you were not superintendent then, but you're in the administration.

That's a terrible, I mean, objectively speaking, a terrible use of money to have spent that much money and then not put it to use and lose money on the sale.

Like, how do you avoid those kinds of decisions going forward?

- Being more thoughtful.

I think the intentions were good, but I'll admit to you, it wasn't a wise decision.

The intentions were to move all of our central office staff into that building so that we could then not have to have as many satellite buildings for administration.

That was the intent from what I'm aware of, it wasn't a wise decision to purchase it, but I do wanna say, over the last 11 months, I'd like to say that my administration has done more, again, to right-size this district than we've probably done in a decade.

We've sold approximately 11 properties.

We've revenue generated about approximately $27 million over the last 11 months.

Along with, again, bringing a slate of five schools for us to look at right-sizing our district.

In the past 11 months, we've done more than has happened in a decade, and I think it's a testament to my commitment along with my team's commitment to the work.

- Four minutes left here, Laura.

- That's a busy 11 months.

[Roderick laughing] Is this something you want to keep doing permanently?

Do you want the permanent superintendent role?

- I'd love to have the permanent superintendent role.

Whenever I've been asked that question, I've been clear from the start, I believe it's important to operate with integrity.

I think now more than ever, our community as well as our school district needs stability.

I think they need someone at the helm who knows the work, who knows the district, who knows the community, who has the relationships at the City Council, at the County Commission.

I think I'm the person for that.

I won't shy away from that, but at the end of the day, it'll be left up to our board to make that decision.

What I do is I wake up each and every day excited about the work, committed to the work, and feeling at this point in time, I'm the right person for such a time as this.

- The board could take a couple of paths to determining the next superintendent, and they have yet to say what they would do.

They could appoint you, but they could also ask you to reapply through a search.

Would you reapply if the board pursues a superintendent search?

- If the board decides to do that, again, it's their will to do what they feel that they need to do.

At that time, I'll make that decision.

But if you were asking me today, I would say yes, I have no problem.

I've never had a problem with competing for any role or any position that I've ever assumed to in this district.

- With a couple minutes left, we can do a whole show on this, but the impact of the federal intervention, the Memphis Safe Task Force, specifically ICE, there's been lots of anecdotal reports of maybe students and families staying home.

What are you seeing in terms of that overall federal intervention and ICE specifically?

- Yes, sir.

At this time, we haven't seen any ICE agents on our properties, and so, with there not being any ICE agents on our property, we've just continued to tell our principals to give them guidance around if for whatever reason, ICE agents show up at schools, please refer to this guidance.

We've encouraged our students and parents to come to school each and every day because we believe schools are the best place for students to be each and every day, along with it being the law.

So at this time, we don't have any issues with what's been going on with the Safe Task Force.

- Have you seen students staying home?

- We don't have any data that rises to the level of saying that there's an issue district-wide.

- What was the change to the bus services that was partlY, it was asked for by families.

Can you walk through that briefly?

- Yes, our board wrote a resolution asking us to go back and to return in 30 days and to provide to them what the cost association would be if we wanted to reduce our PRZ zones, which are our parental responsibility zones.

- Gotcha.

- For elementary schools, it's up to a mile and a half, so if a student lives beyond a mile and a half, we provide transportation.

In secondary schools if they live two miles, and so we reduce it by a half a mile to look at the cost that would be associated.

- Last one, do you have any thoughts on the county mayor race?

- No thoughts.

- No thoughts at all?

- Well, no, one thing about the race is I pretty much know all of the individuals who are in the race, whoever wins.

- Your former boss, Marie Feagins has said, she's looking to run for county mayor.

Do you have thoughts on that?

- I don't have any thoughts.

We live in a democracy.

Well we live in a republic, and so hey, people are open to do whatever they wish to do.

- Okay, thank you.

Thanks for being here, thank you, Laura, thank you for joining us.

Again, we taped this a week ago, so things that we didn't get to with the superintendent, again, it's been a week since this was recorded.

Recently, we had Justin Pearson on the show talking about his time in office and his run for the US Congressional seat that Steve Cohen now holds, he was on the show recently as well as was Paul Young.

You can get all those at wkno.org, YouTube, or The Daily Memphian.

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

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