Conaway: 3Gs deal isn’t a Christmas gift; it’s a theft
Shelby County plans to give Memphis-Shelby County Schools $72 million to build a new high school in the Cordova area — an agreement that addresses the ongoing negotiations for Germantown’s namesake schools. (Abigail Warren/The Daily Memphian file)
Dan Conaway
Dan Conaway was a freelance columnist with The Daily Memphian from 2018 to 2025.
I know I promised you Part Two of Ghost of a River this week (following up on Part One), but I have to do something first. We’ll explore the river and a forgotten part of Tennessee next week.
This week, I have to report a theft in progress.
Germantown isn’t getting three school properties for Christmas as part of the recent deal for the so-called 3Gs: they’re stealing them from Memphis and Shelby County.
Oh, Millington is getting one under their tree, too, as part of the theft, but no one seems to care much about that.
If you don’t live in Germantown or Millington, you’ve just had your pocket picked. Big time.
It’s obvious. It’s happening right under our noses, and it smells to high heaven. Even more amazing, at least to me, is that no one seems to care very much about that either. Oh, meetings are being held, and deals are being made, but not out in the open.
From the very beginning, this has been such a rotten deal for the children of Memphis-Shelby County Schools and the taxpayers who support them that the public wouldn’t be able to stomach the details.
Maybe the details are vague at best because one of the people responsible, one who’s been working on this for years, is Germantown’s former state senator Brian Kelsey.
His guilty plea for other crimes has taken attention away from this one.
Maybe the details are vague because Memphis-Shelby County Schools are such a hot mess that the nearly 4,000 kids in the three Germantown schools — the kids there now and the 4,000 who would come behind them — are not a priority.
Former superintendent Joris Ray’s alleged fooling around with women he supervised, while hiring and promoting and paying his sister a ton of taxpayer money, is a lot more interesting than those 4,000 kids.
Ray is now the former head of the district, and the school board who twiddled their thumbs while all of Ray’s rumored but ultimately unconfirmed twiddling was going on is now in a certifiable crisis mode, and all of our 100,000 kids are in need of some class at the head of the class.
Maybe Kelsey’s other parting gift to Shelby and Davidson counties — school vouchers, the spending of public funds on private schools, the gift of tax dollars placed in the collection plate of religious schools — overshadows the Germantown heist.
After all, that nasty voucher legislation and its backroom shenanigans contributed to the resignation of Glen Casada as Tennessee House speaker after only seven months in office, and the stench of it lingers in the chamber, all over Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee and here.
Maybe it’s the massive and targeted overreach by the state, led by our own suburban legislators a decade ago, taking over the education of our children, isolating our poorest and most challenged on an urban island surrounded by brand-new suburban districts and creating seven districts from two.
Maybe that’s hardened us to believe the legislature can get away with anything as long as that anything diminishes Memphis.
That recent history is written in Black and white.
Whatever it is that’s making us largely ignore this, State Rep. Mark White and the gang in Nashville have just about pulled it off. Germantown is in White’s district.
They’ve made a new law, again pointing the gavel like a gun at Memphis, demanding the surrender of Germantown High, Middle and Elementary schools by Memphis-Shelby County Schools to the Germantown school district by the first of January.
If the districts hadn’t reached an agreement by then, the state would make one for them.
Even though those three schools remained in the Memphis-Shelby County school district (then the Shelby County Schools) as a condition of the state legislation that originally allowed for the creation of seven local school system, it should be obvious by now that the state wasn’t about to stand by that.
This theft was in the works from the very beginning, and Kelsey and White were the probable bagmen. Germantown Mayor Mike Palazzolo is also in the getaway car.
They’ve made it all look very complicated, so we’d just lose interest. But here are a few simple things to note.
Note:
All three schools sit on Memphis-Shelby County Schools district property. They’re being forced to sell.
All three schools are in the heart of Germantown, most especially Germantown High. The land is worth a fortune to a developer and the city. They should be licking their chops over the money to be made and new taxes generated on one hand, and new city property acquired on the other. While the law suggests that all three schools should be used for educational purposes, it is not required if that isn’t needed.
Note:
The Germantown school district has been mostly silent, and that silence speaks volumes. They don’t want or need those schools. They’re barely, if at all, involved in the discussion.
Note:
The Memphis-Shelby County Schools board has already indicated that they need something in the neighborhood of $110 million to $125 million to build a new high school.
It’s been reported that the county has met privately — maybe in the cloakroom of one of the school classrooms — with MSCS and the City of Germantown and reached a deal. A bad one. The county will put up $72.5 million to build a new school in Cordova.
Note:
If you don’t live in Germantown, and most of us don’t, that’s $72.5 million of your and my money. Germantown’s part of the deal is an offer of $5 million for both Germantown Elementary and Middle, and they get Germantown High School, too, that you and I are replacing somewhere.
Germantown is going to “help” sell the high school property. Sure, they are, and they probably already know who’s going to buy it and who’s going to benefit.
Germantown’s proposed outlay is $5 million. Yours and mine is more than $100 million, and that’s to replace just one school, not three.
The three schools sit on a combined 47 acres of prime Germantown real estate. For comparison, Carrefour at Kirby Parkway and Poplar Avenue is 10 acres and recently sold for $17 million: $1.7 million an acre, and they’re going to raze every building.
Do the math. Just that one example makes the 3G property worth at least $70 million to $80 million.
Germantown will make out like bandits, and we’ll strap an already strapped system and county with new debt.
Yes, Cordova will get a new high school, but that should have happened anyway, and the whole Germantown issue never should have occurred.
I believe there is zero intent to use the schools as schools. Zero. They’ll be leveled at the very first opportunity. If they do let the students now in Germantown High School graduate as promised — and don’t bet on it — bulldozers will follow the last student out, and his or her mortarboard will be used as, well, an actual mortarboard.
If you are among those singing the school song or remaining nostalgic for good old Germantown High, you’re being played.
It’s gone, regardless of what happens. They’re not going to fix it up or build a new one. Not the high school, nor either of the other two.
The solution is simple.
Millington actually wants to keep the school it’s getting, Lucy Elementary, and keep those kids in it. They’re not trying to steal it, so sell it.
In Germantown, the Memphis-Shelby County school system should keep the property.
If Germantown wants the schools, turn them over and rent them out. Call their bluff.
If Germantown wants the property, the price is the cost of building a replacement school for the ones you just tried to steal.
Germantown should pay its debt to society for all of this.
I know this solution probably won’t happen. We’ve held our collective noses and looked the other way for too long, and deals have been made; proverbial cigars lit in the proverbial smoke-filled room.
Before the deal was made this week and the Limburger cheese served, there were rumblings of a lawsuit. Please. Somebody file it today. No time to waste. The getaway car is running.
The stink of the state of Tennessee’s rotten manipulation of its second-largest city and largest county at the hands of our very own elected suburban officials has got to stop.
With all the wisdom and weight of his two years of experience in the state legislature, state Rep. John Gillespie (R-Memphis) captured the essence of the problem: “Neither side wanted to play fair, so the state had to step in.”
The condescending arrogance and irony of that statement says it all.
And don’t bother with the usual load of whataboutism. Whatever else anybody else is guilty of, Germantown and the Tennessee General Assembly are guilty of this.
I’m a Memphian, and I’m being robbed in Germantown in broad daylight.
Dan Conaway on demand
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