On Monday, the Memphis City School Board voted on a resolution that allows the voters of Memphis a choice…to merge, or stay seperate from the Shelby County Schools. I wrote about this issue before the vote here.
Tonight, a special meeting of the MCS School Board will be held at 6pm to approve the minutes of the meeting back on the 20th. This is a procedural meeting to ensure that all the i’s are dotted and t’s crossed to allow the referendum vote on the charter resolution.
Going forward, one of the most interesting things to me will be how the media chooses to cover this event. To that end, I’ve started a page that includes all the local, and some national media coverage. It can be found on the navigation bar to the right under the heading School Consolidation – Following the Media Narrative.
How things are reported is often as important as what is reported. To that end, I hope to be able to spend some time analyzing these reports, dealing with some questions as they arise, and dispelling myths as they come up.
Time is short. This issue will come up for a vote in as few as 45 days, creating a scenario where there will be three critical elections in very short order (HD 98 primary, School vote, HD98 general). This will make the task of informing the public on the issues, an already difficult task, even more difficult. To that end, there are groups of people already forming to address issues and inform the public. I hope to maintain a list of those groups and organizations as I become aware of them. Feel free to notify me of any that arise in the comments of this post.
One group in favor of the proposal that started on Facebook is called Vote YES Memphis – Surrender the City Schools Charter. I encourage you to like that page as I feel it will be a good vehicle for discussion and additional information.
On an administrative note, I’ve added a functionality to the site that allows users to share and like posts on Facebook as well as Tweet posts directly from this site. The buttons are located at the bottom of each post. In addition, there is a button that allows users to make a PDF of posts for printing and distribution via email. Feel free to test these and please report any problems in the comments or via the Contact Page.
Finally, I want to wish all of my readers a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. See y’all on the flip!
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