“Sign up for Chalkbeat Tennessee’s free newsletter to keep up with statewide education policy and Memphis-Shelby County Schools. The five candidates running for Memphis’ District 9 school board seat range from a longtime incumbent and former board chair to the sole state takeover advocate on the 2026 ballot. All are running in the district’s first school board Democratic primary on May 5 to fill the seat held by current vice chair Joyse Dorse Coleman since 2018. This election comes as state lawmakers are moving to create a board of managers that could take away local authority and key board functions. Early voting begins on April 15. The five District 9 candidates include Coleman, a former board chair, and Damon Curry Morris, a vocal parent advocate and pro-state takeover candidate. Jonathan Carroll is a local Democratic party leader running as a school system outsider, and Louis Morganfield is the building engineer at Ida B. Wells Academy. Tamara Jordan has more than a decade of experience teaching in and leading local charter schools. District 9 covers around 12,000 students and their families living between Memphis’ Cooper Young neighborhood and Germantown . The 24 schools, including Overton High and Colonial Middle, educate a student group that is 60% economically disadvantaged. Around one in three students is Hispanic, and 65% are Black. Elementary students in District 9 slightly exceeded MSCS average math proficiency rates on the Tennessee Comprehensive Assessment Program, or TCAP, last year. But they lagged behind the district average for literacy by a few percentage points. Use our interactive map to see if you’ll be voting in this district based on your home address. And read full responses from District 9 candidates to a Chalkbeat survey here: Jonathan Carroll Carroll has served on the executive committees of the Shelby County and Tennessee Democratic Party since 2013 and 2022 respectively. He’s the four-year president of the neighborhood association in Normal Station, where he’s lived since 1995, and works for an apartment safety nonprofit called SafeWays. Carroll doesn’t have any ties to MSCS, a distinction that he says separates him from his running mates. “I have never taken a paycheck directly or indirectly from the school system or worked for a contractor that does,” Carroll told Chalkbeat. “I can bring that outsider perspective and look at things and see how they can be improved.” Caroll led his son’s Parent-Teacher Association at Middle College High School for over three years and volunteered on the statewide PTA as the legislative affairs chair for one year. He’s a graduate from the University of Memphis. In the face of an impending state takeover of MSCS, Carroll says it’s important for school board members to commit to working together and put vendettas aside. Most important MSCS issue to address: Lack of public trust “I would work to rebuild that trust by working with disparate groups across the city, holding multiple town halls with other school board members and city and county leaders where we will listen to the needs of the parents and students, and showing that the school system we deserve is here for them.” Joyce Dorse-Coleman Dorse-Coleman has a long-running tenure on the Memphis-Shelby County school board, beginning in 2018 as a member and serving as the chair last year. She also introduced the resolution to fire former Superintendent Marie Feagins last January , which sparked backlash from community members and state leaders. She says she sticks around on the board to counter false perceptions of the district and its leaders. “We have amazing people in our district,” Dorse-Coleman said. “We just also have a few naysayers that make things seem like we’re the worst of the worst. And I know that’s not true.” She grew up in Orange Mound and attended Melrose High School, which is part of District 9. Dorse-Coleman is an advocate for local, state, and federal education leaders to help fund school initiatives including teacher recruitment and retention. Most important MSCS issue to address: Lack of funds “If we had more funding, we wouldn’t have to worry about closing schools. Buildings could be fixed up…We would be able to hire more teachers and pay the teachers that we have, because they seriously deserve more.” Tamara Jordan Jordan has been an educator for 15 years, working in charter school systems including Gestalt Community Schools, which participated in the now defunct, state-run Achievement School District . Gestalt was the first network to pull out of the state-run ASD in 2017 by closing the two schools it managed. She also taught at Freedom Preparatory Academy, and eventually served as dean through 2023. Jordan says she wants to run an audit on MSCS’ curriculum to make sure it’s aligning with state standards and assessments. That could help better reflect students’ literacy abilities, she said. “Think about a student that’s been taking tests and doing work all year, and they get a test that they‘ve never seen, like they don’t know how to answer the questions,” Jordan said. “We’re not teaching to the test, but we do want (students) to be familiar with the test.” Most important MSCS issue to address: Facility deficits and state takeover “I would address the facility deficits by pushing for a proactive approach to the deferred maintenance budget. An audit of all assets with fidelity would need to happen, so that repairs can be prioritized based on risk ROI. Also, I would push for routine inspections of critical systems: such as, HVAC and plumbing. As far as the State takeover threats, I would suggest pushing a plan that is catered to each individual school to present to the Tennessee General Assembly.” Damon Curry Morris Morris is the only candidate across all four district races who’s in favor of an impending state takeover of MSCS. He says he’s advocating for parents and students who support the intervention and has met with the Republican lawmakers sponsoring these efforts in Nashville throughout the last year. “I was heavily involved in it, and no other candidate can say that,” he told Chalkbeat. “My strength is diplomacy. Once they fired (Feagins), the only thing that the district continued to do, the board members continued to do, was fuel the fan of those fights. Now my job was to go up there to minimize the impact.” Morris is a regular speaker at Memphis school board meetings, often criticizing decisions that he says lead to a lack of trust in the district. In August, Morris was arrested outside of the school board building , The Daily Memphian reported, for allegedly violating a restraining order against him by current member Stephanie Love. Morris called the incident a “ploy” to keep him from running on the school board. “Let’s be fair here, I’m not the most popular candidate amongst the elite, the people who have been [in the district] for 20 or 30 years,” he said. Morris told Chalkbeat that the restraining order is still active, but Love, the Shelby County Public Defender, and Morris’ lawyer did not respond to requests for confirmation. Morris worked as a substitute teacher in Memphis City Schools starting in 1999. He also was a behavioral specialist at Treadwell Middle School in 2005 for 12 years and now home-schools and tutors students. Most important MSCS issue to address: Lack of public trust “We have to be real about how we got here and the contributing factors. The enrollment has plummeted because of some of the board’s actions and this opened the door for a state intervention.” Louis M. Morganfield III Morganfield serves as the building engineer for Ida B. Wells Academy, a beloved school in South Memphis that board members voted to close at the end of this year . He told Chalkbeat Tennessee that the school should serve as a model for the district because of its small class sizes, which he says could help improve the district’s low literacy rates. “You can’t continue to do the same thing over and over again that you have been doing for the last 30 years, and scores only improve by an inch or a half an inch at a time,” Morganfield said. “With small class sizes, you’re able to meet the children where they are.” He said reducing class sizes would mean hiring more teachers and assistants, an issue that MSCS already struggles with. “We need to change the culture,” Morganfield said. “We need to listen to our teachers.” Most important MSCS issue to address: Literacy “We can’t do what we want to do to raise the scores if you don’t engage with the parents, to teach the parents how to help their children.” Bri Hatch covers Memphis-Shelby County Schools for Chalkbeat Tennessee. Reach Bri at bhatch@chalkbeat.org.
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