WKNO TRANSCRIPT
CHRISTOPHER BLANK (Host): When Memphis-Shelby County Schools Superintendent Marie Feagins was recently fired by the School Board, she promised to see them in court. Well, a lawsuit dropped this week that makes a series of allegations that offer a deeper, if one-sided, look into local politics. With us to talk about that and other things is political analyst Otis Sanford. Welcome back.
SANFORD: Thank you, Chris. Good to be with you.
BLANK: You know, one thing this lawsuit contends is that officials violated open records law by discussing her firing back in August over a dinner. Otis, you know, if you're around Memphis long enough, you've seen politicians chatting at restaurants and parties and things like that. I imagine a lot gets talked about over dinners. Why would this constitute illegality?
SANFORD: The state open meetings law is fairly clear in that you can't have a meeting even if it's with just two or three members of the same body, like school board or city council or county commission -- you cannot meet even over dinner if you're discussing official business, and certainly if you're discussing it with an intent to lead to a decision that you would make once you get into the public meeting. That's a violation. So if that happened here, that is a violation and to me a very serious one.
BLANK: The lawsuit claims that things started getting dicey when a tutoring nonprofit called Peer Power did not get a contract renewed with the district, but they didn't find out about it until months after Feagins made the decision to drop them. The lawsuit also said City Council member JB Smiley then told Feagins he had gotten pressure to let her go by members of that nonprofit or funders of that nonprofit. Here in Memphis, government often partners with nonprofits to get different jobs done. Are there any revelations that come from this lawsuit in terms of how much influence these nonprofits have on government agencies?
SANFORD: Well, I mean, certainly, if it's true, and again, these are just allegations. But if it is true that one of the board members put pressure on another elected official to work on getting the superintendent fired, obviously, that's a big problem. And yes, there are instances in this community where nonprofits working with government agencies have some influence with the elected officials. So again, these are allegations. If this makes it into court, we'll see where that goes. But there's a lot of "he said-she said" right now and I'm willing to wait to see if any of this rings true later on.
BLANK: Well, so now the Shelby County Commission has decided to start looking more closely into the money, with an audit of Memphis-Shelby County Schools. And on top of that, Commissioner Mickell Lowery has said county government needs more control over the $427 million it gives to the school system every year. What might be the pros and cons of all this added oversight?
SANFORD: Well, when it comes to the audit, I think there there's more pro than con here. I think this is a good idea. Some financial questions have been have been raised here. And so, I think a financial audit is a good idea here. Now in terms of oversight, more oversight, that might be a little bit too much. We don't want the county commission micro-managing to that level, I don't think. But again, I think the audit is a very appropriate thing to do right now.
BLANK: Do you think some of this is an attempt to get the state to back off a little bit from taking over the district, you know, that has been proposed.
SANFORD: Yeah, I think so. And I think Mickell Lowery on the county commission said as much. This may be a way to get the legislature to say, "let's see if the county commission can get a handle on what's going on down there and maybe we won't need to take it over."
BLANK: Well, finally, Otis, last week, the state passed a few new immigration laws. But this week, we're seeing that state government wants to go one step further and prevent schools from educating the children of undocumented people. And the specter of ICE going into schools and arresting children in class has already caused a drop in attendance. Conservative lawmakers might say, "So what? Education is for American citizens." What is the other side of this issue?
SANFORD: The other side of the issue is common decency. There has been a Supreme Court ruling and an accepted practice going all the way back to 1982 that says that children in this country, whether they are or documented or undocumented, have a right to be educated. And so now we're at a point where it just seems like the Republicans at the national and the state level are saying, you know, to heck with these children. So what are you going to do? They're here and if they are not going to be in school, then what are they going to be doing? Let's fix the immigration issue in a way that doesn't harm children who need to be educated.
