What exactly is it that Signal Mountain residents want for their schools?
Perhaps a better question is what does a committee of seven investigating the viability of Signal seceding from Hamilton County and forming a separate school system want? And how does what that committee wants differ from what all local residents want?
Signal Mountain already has some of the best schools in the county - in part because the students are from comfortable, even affluent families who have been instrumental in forming the Mountain Education Fund which supplements tax dollars for things like advanced placement classes as well as art and music teachers.
But since February, the seven-member committee has been investigating whether Signal Mountain can break away from the county school district to create a separate district for the mountain's 2,500 mostly white and few poor students.
Last week, the committee and handful of interested others traveled to Memphis on a "fact-finding" trip and three days of meetings with superintendents and mayors from five of the six municipalities in Shelby County that created their own school systems in 2014 after the overwhelmingly black Memphis school district merged with the primarily white Shelby County Schools in one of the largest school mergers in the nation's history the year before.
It was West Tennessee's newest version of white flight.
Signal Mountain doesn't have that excuse. At least not exactly.
Signal Mountain has something more akin to green flight. When you get right down to it, the impetus for this push is that some Signal Mountaineers don't want their tax dollars paying for the education of inner city students in Hamilton County Schools.
Of course, those mountaineers making this push have never verbalized it that way. Instead they talk about "localized control" and "decision-making power" and freedom from "layers of bureaucracy to problem-solve."
"Local control is power," said Tom McCullough, a member of the Signal Mountain committee, long-time educator and former principal of Signal Mountain Middle/High School who retired under a cloud after he was suspended over his handling of a school-sanctioned senior trip in which students and staff chaperones were accused of consuming alcohol. On the mountain these days, there is some talk about McCullough as superintendent of a new Signal school system if one is formed.
But power motivations aside, follow the money. And follow the talk of money.
Signal Mountain Town Council members were told during initial research that mountain schools would receive $19 million a year in county and state taxpayer money to educate students there. Now the county receives that money and spends only $13 million of it each year on Signal schools. The rest - thanks to a complicated education formula intended to mimic equity - is spent on schools in poorer communities.
The same was true in Shelby County, as was the fact that forming a system is in itself more expensive since any new system must hire superintendents, assistant superintendents, pay for school buildings and maintenance and elect board members - things that before were not part of balance sheets of neighborhood schools.
So Signal Mountain, like the newly formed systems in Memphis' satellite communities, would have to raise taxes. (We should note that several years ago, both Signal Mountain and Walden voters approved a half-cent sales tax increase that provided $10 million toward the construction of Signal Mountain Middle/High School when county officials balked at new mountain school construction.)
"They [the Shelby municipalities] talked about how it was important for them to fund their schools," said Melissa Wood, another Signal committee member.
So let's review: Signal system proponents began this secession venture because they didn't like where their tax dollars were being spent. Now they're all about raising Signal taxes for schools - their schools. Heaven forbid that they or their children ever need to leave the mountain to shop, start a business, have their teeth cleaned, get their car serviced or seek medical attention. After all, those workers were educated in Hamilton County schools.
There is no winner in any of this. The Hamilton County Board of Education and the Hamilton Commission should see this Signal Mountain revolt as the collateral damage of operating a school system on the cheap. And communities like Signal should see educational equity as a prize that benefits us all.
All of our schools should be better funded.