As Tennessee schools prepare for a new academic year, superintendents Jason Manuel of Germantown Municipal School District, Allison Clark of Arlington Community Schools, and Ted Horrell of Lakeland School System joined host Eric Barnes and the Daily Memphian's Mary Cashiola for this week's WKNO/Channel 10 "Behind the Headlines" to discuss the challenges facing their districts.
Teacher recruitment was among the first issues discussed. Clark said Arlington enters the school year fully staffed, and Horrell said Lakeland expects to do the same. Germantown, meanwhile, is still working to fill vacant positions. Despite those differences, all three superintendents agreed that attracting and retaining educators has become increasingly difficult.
"We have to really work on the culture," Clark said. "High salaries attract them, but to retain them and keep them in there, especially very talented educators, you have to really be creative in igniting it and making connections with them on a regular basis."
The discussion then shifted to the growing number of state mandates affecting public schools, including new curriculum requirements, physical fitness assessments, and student cell phone restrictions. Horrell said Lakeland School System recently updated 36 board policies, most of them because of legislation passed during this year's legislative session.
That led to a broader discussion about school funding and Tennessee's voucher program. Manuel argued that public schools face a growing number of state mandates while simultaneously losing funding when students use vouchers to enroll in private schools. He remarked that private schools are not held to the same accountability standards as public schools.
"I have no problem if you're adding 40, 50 laws every single year on public schools that we have to monitor and adjust," Manuel said. "But the second that you take public dollars and give them to private citizens or private school systems without any accountability, I want to say, why do we have this high level of accountability that's really hurting public education and not allowing it to transfer over?"
The conversation ended with a discussion about school accountability, specifically focusing on Tennessee's letter grading system for schools.
Clark emphasized that student success encompasses more than just standardized test scores. Meanwhile, Manuel questioned whether Tennessee's school letter grades accurately measure performance, saying they compare schools and student groups to one another instead of providing a straightforward measure of achievement.
