How many school closings will it take? How much public outrage will it require, before someone – anyone – rectifies the absurd and embarrassing lack of air-conditioning in 24 Memphis public schools?
It happened again last week, as it happens nearly every fall and spring: The Memphis heat climbs above 90 degrees and 24 public schools become uninhabitable. These children are cheated out of the public education their parents’ tax dollars have paid for. As the situation stands now, there are two separate, but very unequal, classes of students in Memphis city schools: Those with air-conditioning, and those without. Even more disturbing is the fact that many of the schools affected are in low-income areas. (Somehow, we suspect this problem would not be tolerated at White Station or Grahamwood or Ridgeway.)
Mayor Herenton has often boasted of Memphis’ budgetary surplus. We are, as a city, spending millions of public and private dollars to develop downtown for tourists and businesses, and yet, hundreds of our children go to school in substandard facilities, year after year after year. What is the message sent to those children? What does it say about us?
We ask again: Where is the city council on this issue? Where is the mayor? Who will step forward and speak for the children? Someone? Anyone? n
Another Memphis in May International Festival has come and gone, successfully. Regrets? We have a few – mainly in the departure of some of the principals whose efforts over the years made this annual celebration one of the nation’s finest and best-attended.
Most notable of these – both by reason of his tragic recent suicide and in the fact that, in the years before his partnership with MIM was so publicly dissolved last year, he had truly put this city on the music-festival map – was the late Bob Kelley, promoter par excellence and a good friend to many of us in this city.
We are also losing the services not only of Alan Balter, the longtime music director and conductor of the Memphis Symphony Orchestra, who is moving on, but also, it would seem, of James Hyter, whose superb basso profundo renditions of “Ol’ Man River,” sung with backing from Balter’s ensemble, have long been a highlight of the annual Sunset Symphony performance that customarily closes MIM’s monthlong round of activities. (Hyter’s leave-taking is apparently not a sure thing; he seems to have left the public some voice in determining what might turn out to be the same or an amended role in Memphis in May. If so, this is a no-brainer: Our vote is for the legendary singer to keep on, like his famous subject, rollin’ along.)
Despite several changes in the administration of Memphis in May, the event kept to its usual levels of attendance, more or less, and there is ample reason to suppose that the best is yet to come. That can’t happen, of course, for at least another 11 months.
But not to worry. Memphis in June (as a vintage popular song by
that name would remind us) is still a place well worth living
in and visiting – the current temperatures in the ’90s notwithstanding.
