Shelby County Mayor Mark Luttrell warned the schools consolidation transition planning commission that it cannot ignore the issue of suburban municipal school districts as it draws up the blueprint for a consolidated countywide school system.

And at the planning commission’s meeting Thursday, Feb. 2, he expressed concern that the commission is not selling its work as effectively as it should against the backdrop of other competing development like the suburban plans to form their own school systems.

“At the end of the day, my concern is that we have a good education system that the community is behind,” he said. “The way that I see us going at this point, we are not moving in that direction.”

“The interest I must represent is quite frankly the political side of the question as well as the operational side,” Luttrell said, expressing concern about “our inability to sell this product to the community.”

At his suggestion, the planning commissioners voted to ask the suburban mayors to meet with them and talk about their moves toward municipal school districts.

Bartlett Mayor Keith McDonald, who like Luttrell serves on the planning commission, said the mayors “look forward” to sharing the reports they have from consultants on the formation of such schools and talking about the issue.

Luttrell and McDonald each said the meeting is no guarantee the two groups will agree on the need for such school districts or the role such school districts could play as part of a consolidated school system.

“I think it’s important that we reach out to the community – to the suburban communities – and hear their thoughts as it relates to municipal districts,” Luttrell continued. “And that we have an opportunity to question the representative from those municipalities as to what they are about – see if we can find common ground to where we can work together and move forward.”

The municipal school reports from the consulting group Southern Educational Strategies LLC were released last month as the planning commission began holding a set of public hearings to get input from citizens on what they would like to see in the new school district.

Several of the six suburban towns and cities are preparing for votes by their boards of aldermen this month on setting a May referendum on the municipal school district question.

Weeks after the reports were released bills were introduced by suburban Shelby County legislators in Nashville to require that any school buildings in the footprint of a municipal school district must be given to the municipal school district at no cost.

That was followed by two more bills that would remove a key piece of unincorporated Grays Creeks from the city of Memphis annexation reserve area and require a referendum among those being annexed before an area could be annexed by a city.

The SES reports outline school districts for five of the six municipalities that include territory in the city of Memphis annexation reserve. And the school districts would not be limited to only students from a given town or city attending only schools in that town or city.

Several of the suburban mayors have said the idea is to retain students now attending the schools in their cities by keeping intact the existing attendance zones even if the students don’t live in that particular city.

Meanwhile, the planning commission is nearing a milestone in two weeks. That’s when the first of its committees will make recommendations on a basic structure for the merged school system. A decision on how the new school system will be structured is the framework for the rest of the recommendations to come on curriculum and school services like transportation and school lunches as well as the size of schools and their attendance zones.