June 2, 2008
The Memphis City School System (MCS) is much in the news lately and most of the news is not good. Investigations, allegations of fraud, mismanagment and poor quality of education results are among daily news items.
Back in January and February of this year I sent two open records requests which were basically ignored until I filed suit in Chancery Court for open records violations. I then started getting some answers but am still waiting for the basic information about job titles, job descriptions, salaries and benefits and information on computers purchases with details on the winning and losing bidders and reasons for the selection of the winning quotes.
As an interim step I have attached some information that I have been furnished concerning square footage and acreage of schools, names, locations and ages of schools and makeup of the school population. This is basic informaiton that should be on their website for parent and taxpayer information. After all, their budget for the coming year is over $1 billion dollars. We continue to spend money building new schools when basically the school population has not increased. Why?
I will keep you informed as I develop more information on this huge part of our tax cost in the City of Memphis as we struggle to keep our heads above water.
Attached are the following files
Enrolled students by school and by grade level
Enrolled students by school, grade level and ethnic catergory
Facilites data by school, date built and area
Zone 1,2,3 and 4 schools by name with acerage, buildings, classrooms, square footage, portable classroom numbers and square footage
Click here to see the student enrollment by school and grade
Click here too see the student enrollment by school, grade and ethnic breakdown
Click here to see the data about the schools in Zones 1,2,3 and 4 schools by name with acerage, buildings, classrooms, square footage, portable classroom numbers and square footage
Click here to see the square footage of the various Memphis City Schools
posted by watchdog at
4:58 PM
1 Comments:
Joe ... You ask why a school system losing students needs to fund new construction.
Smart City addressed this very issue recently: "Perhaps, on paper, our community has enough physical structures, but the truth is that many of them are located in the wrong places, and dozens of the city schools are more than 50 years old (about 10 are more than a century old)."
Here is the answer in full.
Needs
A footnote to the county budget committee meeting is the way that a mythology is building up around a consultant’s report for the Needs Assessment Committee who opined that no new schools ever need to be built in Memphis and Shelby County. It’s hard to take an objective view at the population shifts within Memphis and the deplorable conditions of so many city schools and comprehend how such a conclusion could be stated so flatly.
Perhaps, on paper, our community has enough physical structures, but the truth is that many of them are located in the wrong places, and dozens of the city schools are more than 50 years old (about 10 are more than a century old). In other words, students are being educated in the age of the Internet in buildings that were constructed before the invention of the radio.
If there was no need for new schools, it would of course be welcome news to Shelby County’s budgets, and that’s why it sometimes seems that wishful thinking has set in as county officials hope desperately that the consultant is right. That said, it’s not lost on city school officials that as long as the demand for new schools emanated from the white-majority county district, there seemed to be few questions in previous years, but now that the black-majority city district needs funds for better facilities, a hardening resistance surfaces.
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Anonymous, at 1:04 PM
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