Memphis-Shelby County Schools personnel plan paused by school board

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools Board of Education passed a resolution during a special meeting Tuesday asking Superintendent Marie Feagins to halt further layoffs until she can present a more detailed personnel plan.

The decision comes as the district plans to cut 1,100 positions, of which about 400 are vacant, and offer impacted employees a chance to take up different jobs in the district with different titles and salaries.

Feagins announced the personnel changes in a Monday email, according to board members.Feagins defended the plan during the meeting before the resolution and in a video addressing the email, calling her plan the most "balanced" approach to meeting students’ needs in the district.

“If your position is impacted now or in the future, that shift is directly aligned with the pressing need to maximize our budget to yield improved supports for leaders and outcomes for students,” Feagins said in the video. “If you are impacted, I hope you will strongly consider the proposed position offered to you and continue this deep and necessary work to serve our 110,000 students.”

However, multiple board members took issue with the way in which the plan had been communicated and the pace of the planning process.

“I want to be very clear that in a change management situation, it wasn’t necessarily the ‘what’ or ‘why’ – it’s very clear it was to serve underperforming students, to raise achievement, this budget is focused on getting support to schools – but the communication caused panic and chaos, and when you mess with someone’s livelihood, that is traumatic,” Board member Amber Huett-Garcia said. “I got nothing short of alarm with the district wide email. That was not done well, and communication is a key pillar of how we move through change.”

Board member Frank Johnson said he and other board members support Feagins in making difficult personnel decisions but agreed that the plan had not been communicated properly.

“You cannot build a great culture if people do not hear from you directly and clearly on what the gameplan is,” he said. “This board isn’t out to get you, but this board will answer to its constituents, which are the employees of this district."

Board members Stephanie Love and Mauricio Calvo said the board needs to be more involved in the planning process moving forward in order to communicate the plan properly to constituents.

“We have to work in tandem. We have to work together on these things,” Calvo said. “You are such a strong communicator, and you are crisp in your communications, except this time."

“We saw the budget on Saturday and the email went out on Monday,” he added. “We want to do what’s best for kids, but we cannot be blindsided.”

Board member Keith Williams echoed those concerns and agreed that the personnel plan needs to be hashed out more moving forward.

“I am appalled that this board was not informed and did not know what was going on … All of this could have been avoided had we been a part of the movement,” he said. “It’s very difficult to explain something we were not a part of. A simple organizational chart plotting your plan would have been sufficient to me.”