Metro Nashville Public Schools is celebrating ten years of the Community Achieves initiative and its work to positively impact students.Founded in 2012 with 9 schools, Community Achieves has grown to serve 58 schools and nearly 35,000 students. The initiative is led by the district’s Support Services Department to connect students and families to various opportunities and community resources.

When schools closed abruptly in 2020, derailing education for students across Memphis and the country, Jairia Cathey, a teacher at Evans Elementary, scrambled to provide virtual learning any way she could think of.Plummeting enrollment in MSCS early childhood programs during the pandemic left just a handful of students in her class. When classrooms reopened in the spring, the families of Cathey’s four students decided to keep them learning remotely. And by the time students returned to her classroom after 18 months of distance learning, the few students who came arrived with a severely disrupted preschool experience or having attended no school at all, at risk of falling behind academically, socially, and emotionally.

Tennessee’s largest school district is asking parents to play a larger role in the process of picking its next leader.The Memphis-Shelby County School Board is encouraging parents to take a five-minute survey at MSCSSuperSearch.com and provide their thoughts on what qualifications the next MSCS Superintendent needs to have.

School districts across the state received 23 letters of intent this month for applications to open new public charter schools next year. That’s the first step potential charter operators must take before submitting their formal application by February 1, 2023.The letters of intent include proposed schools in four counties that do not currently have public charter schools and they’re coming from both existing charter operators in Tennessee and those who were rejected this year.

The job wasn’t even one for which he had applied, and after three years and 13 wins, it hardly seemed destined to result in one of the most remarkable coaching journeys in the history of Tennessee high school athletics – or anywhere, for that matter.Now, nearly four decades and more than 800 wins later, Jody Wright remains an institutional icon at Knoxville’s Fulton High School, where he has guided the Falcons to a trio of state basketball championships, five runner-up finishes and more than 10 additional trips.He’s also the Tennessee Secondary School Athletic Association’s Distinguished Service Award winner for December.

The decade-old dispute between Memphis-Shelby County Schools and the Germantown Municipal School District ended Thursday as the two districts’ school boards signed off on a deal that allows Germantown to take over two schools currently operated by MSCS.The resolution, spurred by a new state law, means that thousands of MSCS students who attend the Germantown Elementary, Middle and High schools — known collectively as the “three G’s” — will be able to remain in those schools as the buildings begin a transition to the Germantown district’s control.

The Shelby County Commission Wednesday moved closer to resolving a decade-old dispute over control of three schools in Germantown, approving a deal that would, among other things, provide funding for a new high school in Cordova.But their vote wasn’t a slam dunk. Five commissioners voted against the pact, some of them citing the cost to county taxpayers, and others objecting to the state law that put the future of the Germantown schools and their students in limbo.

City leaders in Germantown unanimously backed an agreement Monday that would allow its municipal school district to take over two schools currently operated by Memphis-Shelby County Schools, the first in a series of votes needed to settle a long-running dispute between the two districts.If the Shelby County Commission votes for the deal Wednesday, and MSCS and the Germantown Municipal School District sign off on it Thursday, Germantown would pay MSCS $5 million for Germantown Elementary and Middle schools, which are both located in the Memphis suburb.

Last week’s Memphis-Shelby County Schools Board of Education meeting provided yet another example of how differently the state’s two largest school districts choose to work with their public charter schools.MSCS school board members unanimously rejected a proposal to shut down four public charter schools that have been designated as Priority Schools.  Arrow Academy of Excellence, Memphis Business Academy Hickory Hill Middle School, KIPP Memphis Academy Middle, and KIPP Memphis Collegiate Middle all made the Priority Schools List for the first time this year.

Beverly Davis, president of the Whitehaven Empowerment Zone PTSO, believes the next superintendent of Memphis-Shelby County Schools should possess one main asset: Bluff City roots.Davis, who is also a member of the MSCS board’s superintendent search advisory committee, addressed a group of about 60 who gathered at Healing Cathedral Christian Church in Whitehaven Wednesday to share their thoughts on who should succeed Joris Ray.

Tennessee’s private school voucher law, which now only affects districts and some students in Memphis and Nashville, would widen to include Hamilton County Schools under new legislation filed this week.Sen. Todd Gardenhire, a Chattanooga Republican, wants the legislature to expand the eligibility criteria for the education savings account program to include students in districts with at least five of the state’s lowest-performing schools, as identified in the last three “priority school” cycles since 2015.

Districts throughout Tennessee and the nation are working to help students recover from learning losses spurred by the COVID-19 pandemic. But another respiratory illness is threatening to undermine that work.Last month, flu outbreaks sparked school closures in at least 10 districts. And while the spread of flu hasn’t prompted closures in any Shelby County schools, the area isn’t immune to the threat.

The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board on Thursday announced a sped-up timeline for its superintendent search and launched a website to give the public more visibility into the process.The new timeline calls for the board to name the next leader of Tennessee’s largest school district by April 2023 — several months sooner than initially proposed last month. The new superintendent would start between May and July, at least a month before the start of the 2023-24 school year.

There had been a previous state championship, and some national acclaim.Yet as Tennessee High School’s legendary squad entered the 1972 football season, the Vikings’ players approached their gauntlet with a twofold mindset: Play for the man on each side of you and “show them we can play a little football up here in Bristol.”Mission accomplished, in a superlative standard that has stood the test of time five decades henceforth.

Two charter schools that have been at odds with Memphis-Shelby County Schools administrators won approval from the school board for their requests to expand.In a pair of 8-0 votes at a specially called meeting, the board allowed Memphis STEM Academy, a K-5 charter school in Frayser, to increase its enrollment, and gave Believe Memphis Academy, a South Memphis college preparatory charter school, permission to add four grade levels beyond its current 4-8.

Metro Nashville Public Schools will host a Teacher Recruitment Fair Saturday to recruit certified and permitted educators across all grade levels. The district aims to have recruited teachers in the classroom as soon as January for the upcoming school year.The district says quality educators are needed in several areas, including English Learner teachers and math and science teachers. Candidates eligible to teach with a permit, or those that hold a bachelor’s degree, are eligible and encouraged to apply.

It’s been sixteen years since Andre Agassi retired from the Association of Tennis Professionals (ATP) tour, but he’s still serving up aces in communities across the country, including Nashville.The former tennis star recently teamed up with Rocketship Public Schools to create a third high-quality public charter school in Nashville. Rocketship Dream Community Prep, serves the Antioch community of Davidson County, providing more than 350 K-4th grade students with music-enriched curriculum.

When the parade begins Saturday morning to celebrate Nashville’s public schools, the students marching will not totally reflect the city’s diverse student population.Metro Nashville Public Schools (MNPS) made the surprising decision to exclude the city’s 30 public charter schools from attending the annual Celebration of Schools and School Options Fair for the first time in its 10-plus year history.