Memphis Merger Plans Hit Some Road Bumps

Germantown, Tenn., residents demonstrate their support for creating a "municipal district" so that the town could run its own schools rather than merge with the Memphis city schools.

—Kyle Kyrlick/The Commercial Appeal/AP-File

Six towns push to run their own schools

By Christina A. Samuels

After the citizens of Memphis, Tenn., voted in March 2011 to fold the city's 103,000-student school district into the neighboring, 47,000-student Shelby County district, supporters said that a unified district would ensure that all students would benefit from a financially stable system.

But as a transition planning commission and a unified school board grind through the process of merging two systems—one urban, one suburban—and two school cultures by August 2013, unity is looking harder to reach.

On May 29, the six other municipalities in Shelby County, each one much smaller than Memphis, voted to move forward with the process of forming their own school districts after Tennessee Gov. Bill Haslam, a Republican, signed legislation earlier in the month enabling...