Zack McMillin - The Commercial Appeal -

At the Board of Education office complex off Hollywood, where Memphis City Schools and the Shelby County Schools have coexisted side by side for more than four decades, there is a second-floor walkway connecting the two districts.

Staffers are using it, says SCS Supt. John Aitken, for the first time in years if not decades. In the past, the path was completely blocked and used as a storage area, Aitken said.

As the process of merging MCS with SCS accelerates, the traffic along that inter-district avenue figures to increase.

Although MCS and SCS remain separate districts operating autonomously for this school year and next, they are already identifying areas where it makes sense to combine efforts.

Take the issue of textbooks. Tennessee mandates all school districts to officially adopt textbooks every year, with various subjects spread over a six-year cycle.

Sometime this school year, both MCS and SCS are required to adopt a particular textbook in, for two examples, business technology and driver's education. In areas like literature and fine arts, that also means textbooks for various grade levels.

With the impending merger, MCS and SCS put together a committee and agreed on a protocol for joint textbook adoption.

Aitken said that because the state only allocates money for specific textbooks based on the fixed six-year cycle, it makes sense for the districts to agree on common textbooks now.

"We felt like obviously where we're getting past 2013 on a cycle of anything we are buying, staffs needed to come together," Aitken said,

The board laid out a seven-step process that will include allowing parents and "all community stakeholders" to inspect the textbooks under consideration.

The textbook committees will have equal numbers of representatives from MCS and SCS, with recommendations made to the board for approval by March.

"There are several advantages for doing this jointly -- mainly that we will have the same textbooks for students enrolled in a particular course," said Linda Kennard, MCS' executive director of curriculum and instruction. "So in two years if a student goes to Collierville High School and takes English 3 we would have the same English 3 book in use at Central High School."

Aitken hopes that helps defray some of the costs of consolidation, as well. While the 21-member schools merger transition commission and the 23-member unified board must make a decision later on whether to align all textbooks across both systems, at the very least there will be two years of the six-year adoption cycle already coordinated.

However, Kennard and Aitken say that the districts are not necessarily required to purchase all new textbooks, just to identify which textbooks they are adopting. The state only allocates money for purchasing textbooks based on the adoption schedule.

For example, the committee could decide driver's education books on hand are sufficient and in good enough condition, but the state money for those books would not become available again until the end of the next six-year cycle.

"I've heard people say, 'Why don't we just wait?' We can't wait," said MCS spokesman Quintin Taylor.

Another area where the districts appear headed toward coordination involves data systems, MCS Supt. Kriner Cash told the merger transition commission on Thursday. He said staff from both systems already had begun work on getting a joint request for proposals for technology he estimated could cost at least $28 million.

Last week, when SCS was given high marks and recommended for accreditation, one of the deficiencies noted by the AdvancED team involved modernizing its data capabilities.

"We've got to get our data systems into the 21st century. That's true of both the county and city," Cash said.

When leaders involved in the Chattanooga-Hamilton County schools merger spoke to transition commission and school board members recently, they said a key to what they labeled a successful merger was the collaborative efforts that developed quickly between the different systems.

Edna Varner, a former Chattanooga principal, compared the early meetings to grade-school dance where nobody wanted to cross the room at first.

"But we made a conscious effort ... and the surprise was we saw the benefits much earlier than we thought we would," she said.

-- Zack McMillin: (901) 529-2564