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The state takeover of Memphis schools could lead to more school closures as seen in other seized local districts Tennessee lawmakers are using as a blueprint.
A state-appointed board of managers is set to take control of key decisions for Memphis-Shelby County Schools in the coming weeks. Its members include a former MSCS superintendent who introduced a plan to close almost 30 schools during his tenure that never came to fruition.
School closures have also been an early move for state-selected leadership in Houston and Fort Worth, the sites of two recent state takeovers that Tennessee proponents have often said they want to use as models for MSCS.
The Houston oversight board voted to close 12 schools this summer. And only two weeks after Fort Worth Independent Schools received a letter announcing its takeover last May, the new board voted to shutter 14 schools over the next four years. Seven are set to close by the end of the month.
Both Texas school districts are facing declining enrollment and aging school buildings, issues that MSCS leaders have also zeroed in on this year. Fort Worth has lost over 13,000 students since 2019. MSCS enrollment dropped by 10,000 students in the past decade.
That’s why Mark Sturgis, a longtime Memphis education advocate who leads the nonprofit Seeding Success, said closing schools should be one of the oversight board’s top priorities. He said “seismic” enrollment drops and challenges with high-quality teacher recruitment mean MSCS buildings are often underresourced.
“You have a system that has 200 district-run schools and 95,000 kids. I mean, the math is pointing out that there is a structural challenge there,” Sturgis said. “As you move resources from a school that’s underenrolled and underutilized and you concentrate that, you can actually offer families a really good option when they do transfer.”
MSCS leaders have already started that work. In February, the local board approved Superintendent Roderick Richmond’s plan to close five schools at the end of this school year. Richmond plans to close up to 10 more in the next two years.
Those decisions were met with some backlash from Memphis families and educators, which caused the district to transfer one neighborhood school into a different building last month. But district leaders argue there’s no way to sustain buildings with dwindling enrollment numbers and high facility costs totaling over $1.6 billion districtwide.
Dorsey Hopson, who will take a seat on the new MSCS oversight board, rang the alarm on those issues during his tenure as superintendent from 2013 to 2019. During those six years, Hopson closed 17 schools.
He also presented a plan to close 28 more the month before he stepped down as the district leader for a job at insurance giant Cigna. More than two-thirds of those schools are still open today.
“It’s no secret. We have too many schools,” Hopson told Chalkbeat in 2018. “We just have too many schools whether it’s Shelby County, ASD, charter schools.”
Hopson said then that his main driver for school closures was academics, targeting schools that have failed to reach sufficient proficiency levels. But Chalkbeat found that low enrollment was the common denominator between schools historically shuttered in MSCS, with most of those also falling on the state list of lowest-performing schools.
Hopson did not respond to Chalkbeat’s requests for comment about whether he would bring back plans to shut down dozens of buildings. But Sturgis said the oversight board has the capacity to handle large-scale projects like widespread school closures, unlike the local district. And it’s free from the political pressure of an elected board that often stifles school closure plans.
“We know where a lot of these schools are — it’s where population density is dropping and it’s usually concentrated in a couple board members’ districts,” he said. “It must not feel good if you’re the elected representative to close 10 schools in your neighborhood.”
Domingo Morel, who studies school district takeovers at New York University, said the oversight board is still influenced by politics. But instead of catering to what local voters want, state board members are beholden to the people that appointed them — in this case, top Tennessee Republicans.
“All of these things that communities don’t want, the takeover is going to do,” Morel told Chalkbeat. “And you can impose these decisions on the community without any, at least immediate, repercussions, because the community doesn’t have the ability to vote.”
Recent research shows that state takeovers can also contribute to dropping district enrollment. Houston Independent School District was already experiencing declines before the takeover, but those losses have increased since the 2022-2023 school year, according to a University of Houston report.
Sturgis said he hopes the oversight board spends its first year developing a robust closure plan that includes insight from district and local government leadership. That should also include plans for revitalizing shutdown school buildings, he said, and focusing resources on students who need support most.
Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.
