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Gov. Bill Lee announced his five appointees for a new Memphis schools oversight board that will have sweeping authority over Tennessee’s largest school district for the next four years.
The choices came on Friday just after Lee signed the oversight board legislation into law, which authorizes the governor and the top two Republicans in the General Assembly to appoint the nine-person board.
The governor’s appointees include at least one member with intimate knowledge of the district’s inner workings: Dorsey Hopson, who served as Memphis superintendent from 2013 to early 2019. Hopson is now a partner at the City Fund, an organization founded in 2018 to promote the portfolio model of running schools that promotes school choice and charter school expansion.
The other four appointees are Shanea McKinney of Cigna, who is a member of the University of Tennessee’s board of trustees; Nisha Powers, who leads a Memphis civil engineering firm and has served on the Tennessee board of regents; Beverly Robertson, a marketing executive and former president and CEO of the Greater Memphis Chamber of Commerce; and Tyrone Burroughs, a Memphis CEO who sits on the Tennessee Lottery Commission and the Youth Villages board of directors.
The board will have nearly unlimited power to dive into district records, from teacher evaluations to curriculum reviews. It also will control the district’s largest financial decisions, the operating budget, and superintendent’s contract. Its power even extends to the Shelby County Commission, which will be blocked from approving the MSCS annual budget until the oversight board gives its approval.
The oversight board must begin its work by July 1, per the new law. Lt. Gov. Randy McNally and House Speaker Cameron Sexton, both Republicans, get two picks each in addition to Lee’s appointments.
A spokesperson for McNally said he planned to make his appointments in “the very near future.”
Eight of the nine oversight board members must be Shelby County residents under the law. However, Sexton negotiated an arrangement that the House speaker can appoint one oversight board member who does not reside in Shelby County, as long as they live in the state. Political leaders can remove and rename board members at any time, for any reason.
Melissa Brown is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Contact Melissa at mbrown@chalkbeat.org.
