Lawmakers kill bill to allow elected school superintendents
NASHVILLE (AP) — Efforts to allow Tennessee school superintendents to be elected rather than appointed are over for the year.
The House Education K-12 Subcommittee voted 6-4 Tuesday morning against a bill sponsored by Rep. Frank Buck that would have allowed county commissions to decide how to choose their local school superintendents.
House Education Committee Chairman Les Winningham, who sponsored similar legislation, had promised that if one such bill was killed, the others would be taken off notice for the year.
“I knew it was a longshot,” said Buck, D-Dowelltown.
But the battle isn’t over.
There have been regular attempts to change the law since legislators overhauled the state’s public education system in 1992 and required all superintendents to be appointed by elected school boards.
The thinking at the time was that it would remove politics from the system, but Buck said there’s just as much politicking now. “All we’re doing is concentrating it in a five- or seven-member school board,” he said.
Winningham, D-Huntsville, said the current system has taken the control from the people who pay taxes and send their children to public schools.
“The people should be making the decision whether to appoint a superintendent, elect a superintendent or flip a coin,” he said.
There was an attempt to amend the bill to require a two-thirds vote by the county commission to authorize nonpartisan superintendent elections. But it wasn’t handled in an appropriate parliamentary manner, and the bill was voted on as originally proposed — with a simple majority vote by the county commissions and partisan elections.
Tennessee would be in the minority if it allowed superintendent elections. Only four states do so — all in the South, according to a report last fall by the state comptroller’s Office of Education Accountability.
Ethel Detch, director of that office, cautioned lawmakers that if they change the system they may also want to restrict the authority that superintendents have.
When the 1992 law was changed, she said, superintendents were treated like business CEOs and given the power to hire and fire. If they are elected, they would no longer answer to the school board and there would be “greater opportunities for coercion of teachers or influence over them,” she said.
Detch also suggested that lawmakers consider how to remove a superintendent if they decide to allow them to be elected. Otherwise, the voters could remove superintendents only once every four years.
This is largely an urban versus rural issue. Before the 1992 change, only five counties had appointed superintendents and all city and special school districts had them. Several lawmakers who supported Buck’s bill or filed similar legislation of their own are from rural parts of the state.