Wow, the public school system in Tennessee must really be bad.
I live in Antioch where this occurred. The system was headed downhill when I started school in 1979 (the year education was officially “nationalized” by Jimmy Carter as a payoff to the teachers unions), but you at least had some administrators around from the saner days (my elementary school principal in ‘79 was an old woman who had been in charge since the ‘40s).