Leo Murphree has a gripe. After 50-plus years, he says, the Greenwood Community Concert Band has been forced out of a union with Greenwood High School.
But Margaret Clark, president of the Greenwood School Board, said Murphree has only himself to blame for the situation.
Since its inception, the public band had used the high school’s facilities and equipment for Monday night rehearsals. There was no fee, and Murphree, the band’s president, kept his own keys.
The tiff began when Murphree went out of town on business. In his absence, he gave his keys to another member of the band without informing the high school’s band director, Gail Griggs.
“That was completely disrespectful and unprofessional to Mrs. Griggs,” Clark said. “You just don’t give someone else the keys to someone else’s property.”
According to Clark, Griggs happened upon “a man she’s never seen before in her life wondering around the band hall.”
The man was Bob Bunch, another member of the band. According to Clark, he was asked to leave. According to Murphree, “they made him feel like a criminal.”
The matter eventually made its way to school board chambers, where, according to Clark, Murphree and Griggs were told to simply “work it out.”
They were unable to.
“Anyone who knows Mr. Murphree knows that he is difficult to work with,” Clark said this morning. “And you can quote me on that.”
Near the end of August, Murphree received a letter from school board attorney Richard Oakes informing him “that the Greenwood Community Concert Band should plan to practice somewhere other than the high school.”
The letter said the board was awaiting an opinion from the state attorney general’s office regarding the board’s legal authority to allow the band to continue using the school’s facilities.
“Why does that have to go to the attorney general?” Murphree said. “It seems to me the local school board could make those decisions. If not, they don’t have the power to do anything.”
Clark said the board simply wanted to make sure it was following proper procedure.
“We decided that before we went any further, we should make sure everything was legal,” she said.
Last Thursday, Oakes received the attorney general’s response.
Three questions had been posed:
- Could the school board vote to allow the community band to use the school’s facilities? The answer was yes.
- Could the board authorize the band to use the school’s musical instruments and take them off campus? The answer was no.
- Could the board choose to waive any facility fees on a case-by-case basis? The answer was no.
Oakes did not respond to messages seeking comment for this story. However, the letter sent to Murphree in late August said that after receiving a response from the attorney general’s office, the board would take up the matter at its next meeting, voting on whether to allow the band back. The next scheduled school board meeting is Nov. 11, but Clark said this morning that the the matter had not been added to the agenda.
In the meantime, the band n composed of about two dozen musicians from places such as Cleveland, Winona, Batesville, Grenada and Greenwood n has been rehearsing at Pillow Academy. Though Murphree said the situation at the private school is only temporary, Clark claimed Murphree circulated fliers throughout Greenwood claiming that the band was elbowed out of Greenwood High and had found another place to rehearse.
“We’re sort of in limbo,” Murphree said when describing the band’s situation last week.
“There’s a general feeling that the whole thing was all unnecessary to start with,” he said. “Had the administration taken the bull by the horns, we could have made it work.”
Murphree, who has kept more than a decade’s worth of correspondence between himself and the district’s administration, believes the school had been trying to push the band out of its facilities for more than a decade.
“I hope it will open people’s eyes to the politics that are in the school district,” Murphree said. “They want to wonder why people don’t want to support the public schools. Well, I’ve seen firsthand why people don’t.”
Clark said the episode’s seeds were planted by Murphree’s poor choices. “If Mr. Murphree had followed the proper procedure in the first place, this would have never happened,” she said.
Resolving the issue with the keys would have required only one phone call, she said.
One thing’s for certain: The band won’t ever go back to Greenwood High. Murphree said last week he didn’t care what the attorney general’s office thought or school board decided.
“I can’t see us ever wanting to go back there,” he said. “We’re picking up and moving on.”
