A Shelby County commissioner is pushing to cut off the money fueling a lawsuit that has stalled the state’s takeover of Memphis-Shelby County Schools, arguing the district’s resources belong in classrooms rather than courtrooms. Commissioner Britney Thornton, who represents District 10 and its 33 K-12 schools, has requested a resolution ending additional county funding for the litigation challenging the state-appointed MSCS Oversight Board.
The resolution has already cleared a Shelby County Commission committee, according to WREG, and now heads to the full commission, which will take it up on Monday. Both Shelby County government and MSCS have challenged the law creating the oversight board, and the case remains pending in federal court in Memphis. The county previously committed real money to that fight: commissioners voted 8-3 in May to allocate $200,000 toward the lawsuit after Gov. Bill Lee signed a law in April barring school districts from using their own education dollars to sue over state accountability measures, according to Chalkbeat.
What the Oversight Board Would Actually Control
The board at the center of the dispute was created by House Bill 662 and Senate Bill 714, which Tennessee lawmakers passed in April and Lee signed into law on May 22. The nine-member, state-appointed panel would have power to approve MSCS budgets, school closures, and any district purchase over $50,000, per the same Chalkbeat report. State Representative Mark White has confirmed that board members would be paid directly out of the MSCS school district budget, at the same rate as elected school board members, for a four-year period, as reported by localmemphis.com.
The board’s rollout hit a wall on July 1, when U.S. District Judge Waverly D. Crenshaw Jr. issued a temporary restraining order halting it on its scheduled start date and ordering both sides to hold the pre-takeover status quo. That order came in response to the federal lawsuit Shelby County government and MSCS officials filed jointly in June. The 901 Report has covered the standoff as the case winds through court.
Dueling Arguments Over Audit Findings and Democracy
State officials have since pushed back hard. The Tennessee Attorney General’s office moved to dismiss the federal lawsuit after a July 8 audit uncovered more than $119 million in district policy violations, including $54.1 million in potential fraud, waste, and abuse, according to the Tennessee Bar Association. Supporters of the oversight board point to that forensic audit and to student performance data as evidence that additional oversight is needed, per WREG’s reporting…