With a schools consolidation planning commission and a new countywide school board set to convene next month, some of the very specific issues of the merger are creating their own political gravity.

The issues are affecting the lingering differences over the general idea of consolidating the two school systems.

The best evidence came from a roomful of about 100 citizens interested enough in the consolidation to apply for one of the seven positions on the new school board.

As Shelby County commissioners questioned them Wednesday, Sept. 7, the future and definition of optional schools was a key issue.

Memphis City Schools have them. Shelby County Schools don’t.

Eugene Bernstein, an attorney with four children once in the Memphis City Schools optional program, said he would like to see the countywide school system depart from its practice of some schools being a school within a school.

“We have to find another way to accomplish this,” he said. “We cannot continue to segregate our children and continue to learn and know each other.”

His solution would be schools that deal with a specific subject matter.

“That would require significant busing,” Commissioner Heidi Shafer said.

“Yes it would, and that’s the rub,” Bernstein replied. “But if we scatter schools geographically, we can diminish busing.”

Keisha Malone of Arlington is an East High School graduate who was part of the college prep program there, one version of an optional school.

The different versions caused some confusion among parents on the commission and in the audience with children who now attend or have attended the different versions.

Malone specifically objected to the “school within a school” model, referring to the county school system’s philosophical objections to both charter schools and optional programs.

“I think the county has it right with no optional,” Malone said. “I think that promotes the ‘us against them’ mentality in our children. In order for them to see themselves as equal, it needs to be eliminated, but not eliminating some of the classes.”

Commissioner Steve Mulroy asked Malone if she would object to CLUE programs or similar programs for gifted students that involved testing students.

“No, not necessarily,” she answered. “To me, that’s something different.”

Mulroy thought all optional programs involved students who “test in.” But Malone said that’s not the case.

“All schools need to be excellent,” said Commissioner Chris Thomas, who was a CLUE student and former MCS board member. “Optional schools were created to stop people from leaving the Memphis school system.”

Thomas said he favors some version of optional schools.

Former Memphis Mayor and MCS superintendent Willie Herenton, who created the Memphis optional school model, has acknowledged repeatedly over the years that his decision on where to locate the optional programs was designed to stem white flight from the school system.

Pearl Walker brought the notice she got just last week that Kirby Middle School, the school her son attends, is a “high priority” underperforming school and that, as a result, her son is entitled to transfer options to other schools. The notice included a list of schools.

“Only one was an optional school, and that was Snowden and it was full,” she said. “Everything that’s at Snowden makes it a good school. They don’t all have to take place at Kirby, but some of them should take place at Kirby.”

Michelle Moore Lindsay, the parent of an 11-year-old boy in an optional school program, is a fan of the “school within a school” model.

“It provides you an avenue of more stringent academics,” she said. “It created diversity.”

Most of the applicants expressing an opinion about the chancellery model of a school system divided into districts and headed by a chancellor opposed it or at least had reservations. Their problem was that the models they looked at elsewhere involve a mayor appointing the schools chancellor.

But Commissioner Steve Mulroy said he envisions a different version of the model that wouldn’t necessarily involve getting a city mayor involved in direct supervision of the school system.

“When most of us talk about it, it is just breaking the school system into subregions,” he said.

Todd Payne, the general manager of radio station WCRV, argued specifically for representation on the board from Cordova, because of its dual identity with parts of the area within the city of Memphis and other parts in unincorporated Shelby County and both parts with public schools in them.

“The school board needs at least one resident of Cordova that understands the concerns of parents in incorporated as well as unincorporated Cordova,” he said. “Sometimes in Cordova, we feel like we’re in the middle of fights between the city residents and suburban residents.”