Tailgate Talks score helpful information for Memphis superintendent search

The ongoing Memphis-Shelby County Schools superintendent search is receiving helpful information from an unlikely source.At Tuesday’s Memphis-Shelby County School Board meeting, the district revealed it has received around 60 comments on the search at high school sporting events as part of the district’s “Tailgate Talks.”The district has held two Tailgate Talks this month, including one last week at Kirby Stadium that included a large number of comments from younger Memphis residents.“We are doing our due diligence to find a superintendent, but we're taking the time, getting out in the community. Somebody said why are we doing this, this is why we're doing this. Because these young people at Kirby…told us that they felt like they actually had a voice because we stopped, we listened, and we talk with them. Not to them, there's a difference,” said board vice chair Joyce Dorse-Coleman.The district plans to hold the final Tailgate Talk on September 29^. and will combine comments from all three events together to provide the board with public input on the search.Board members plan to use the questions gathered from the tailgate talks and from the initial search process in the upcoming interview process scheduled to begin in November.“We’ve got a great group of people that wanna know about ‘how will you be involved in the community,’ that will be a question that we’ll make sure that we as a board will ask the candidates,” said Dorse-Coleman.The board is still discussing ways to include public engagement during the interview process and is considering utilizing radio interviews and meet and greets.The district has been searching for a new superintendent since former superintendent Joris Ray resigned in July 2022.The search process itself has been chaotic with complaints of a lack of transparency and a lack of communication between the district and search firm. Board members temporarily paused the process in May to organize multiple retreats and update the basic qualifications they were looking for before restarting the search a month later.Search firm Hazard, Young, Attea & Associates is now in the process of collecting applications and plans to present five to eight finalists to the board by December.The board’s goal is to have a new superintendent in place by January.