More than a year after Charlottesville officials opted to pause the planned renaming of two city schools — after a pair of proposed names was shot down — the school division says it is ready to resume the project.
Two new names for Burnley-Moran and Johnson elementary schools will be considered Thursday evening at a Charlottesville School Board meeting.
While a vote is not on the agenda, should the board move ahead with the new names, it will conclude the renaming initiative the school board first undertook in order to bring the names of city schools more in line with modern standards and values roughly four years ago amid a nationwide racial reckoning.
A committee assembled especially for the task has proposed Burnley-Moran be renamed Sunrise Elementary School and Johnson be renamed Tall Oaks Elementary School.
Burnley-Moran was named for Carrie Burnley and Sarepta Moran, two of the city’s first women principals who were also both members of the Daughters of the Confederacy.
According to a statement posted to the school division’s website, Sunrise is “a nod to the school being the easternmost school in our city. … Committee members like the way that sunrise conveys a sense of hope, warmth, and new beginnings. It shows the power of students rising through their years in our school.”
Other options considered were River Vista, Dogwood and River Den in honor of the nearby Rivanna River and the school’s bobcat mascot.
Johnson was named for James G. Johnson, who served as the superintendent of city schools from 1909 until 1946, while the division was racially segregated.
Tall Oaks “embraces its wooded landscape with trails and outdoor learning spaces. The campus prominently contains a large, historic oak among many other oaks across the grounds.” Committee members also said they took inspiration from the expression, “From little acorns come mighty oaks.”
The committee also considered Forest Grove, Rock Creek and Oakleaf, all connected to Johnson’s wooded landscape.
The back-and-forth between the school division and the public over the past four years has grown testy at times, with some uncomfortable with early renaming proposals and others — including relatives of one school’s namesake — uncomfortable with the entire enterprise.
Roughly four years ago, amid a nationwide racial reckoning in America prompted by the murder of George Floyd, a Black man, at the hands of a White Minneapolis police officer, Charlottesville City Schools decided to take a deep dive into the namesakes of all nine of its public schools.
Since then, two elementary schools and the city’s sole middle school have been renamed.
In January of last year, the school board voted to change Venable Elementary School, named after Confederate Gen. Robert E. Lee’s aide-de-camp Charles Scott Venable, to Trailblazers Elementary School. That same month, the board voted to change Clark Elementary School, named after Revolutionary War hero George Rogers Clark, to Summit Elementary School. And in June, the board voted to change the name of Buford Middle School, named for Charlottesville teacher and special education advocate Florence De Launey Buford, to Charlottesville Middle School.
The school division has said it intends to keep the names of Greenbrier and Jackson-Via elementary schools, the former named for the surrounding neighborhood and the latter named for Black educator Nannie Cox Jackson and White administrator Betty Via who helped usher in desegregation in the city.
The school division has expressed no intentions to rename Charlottesville High School, Walker Upper Elementary School or Lugo-McGinness Academy. Charlottesville High is named for the city, itself named for Queen Charlotte, wife of King George III. Walker Upper is named for Haswell Hunter Walker, a White educator in Charlottesville and proponent of desegregation. Lugo-McGinness was named for Alicia Bowler Lugo and Rebecca Fuller McGinness, both Charlottesville natives, educators and Black women.
The renaming of Clark, Venable and Buford stirred up a conversation but did not ultimately prove too controversial. While Buford the woman was a well-respected, powerful force in the Charlottesville community, pushing the city to assist children with special needs early in the development of special education, the decision to rename Buford the school ultimately came down to realigning the middle school with the high school.
Burnley-Moran and Johnson have proven to be far trickier.
“All three of the current namesakes served white-only schools as teacher, principal, or superintendent during the era of school segregation. In other words, the names evoke and honor an era (school segregation) that does not reflect our current values and work,” according to the school division.
But at least one of those namesakes’ descendants have taken issue with that characterization.
Chuck Moran, the great-nephew of Sarepta Moran who still resides in Charlottesville, has been particularly vocal about his frustration over the renaming of the schools. The process, he says, has diminished the accomplishments of his great-aunt. He told The Daily Progress over the summer that assumptions were made about her personal beliefs based on her membership in the United Daughters of the Confederacy, a hereditary organization that has propagated mythologies about the South and the Lost Cause.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Moran, recalling his reaction to hearing school officials describe his great-aunt. “I just couldn’t believe it, because that was not the woman that I knew. [By the time I heard] they were pretty much well decided that they were going to scrub her name off of Burnley-Moran Elementary for which she was named.”
Moran said he was also concerned that many of the fact sheets used to review school names were pulled from “Correcting the Narrative,” a website run by local software engineer Phil Varner. Moran has argued that Varner’s “narratives” were written with the clear objective of changing the schools’ names from the start. Moreover, despite the fact that Varner is not a historian and never claimed to be one, school division officials have referred to him as such on multiple occasions, including in interviews with The Daily Progress.
There is still a chance the school board could balk at the new proposals before them Thursday.
The original proposals for Burnley-Moran and Johnson — Blue Mountain and Cherry Avenue, respectively — were both turned down after public pushback. The former because the school and surrounding city are miles away from the Blue Ridge Mountains, the latter because of concerns the name would be confused with other Cherry Avenue addresses.
Even the newer proposals are not universally adored. A first round of public surveys found that only 28.4% of respondents were in favor of the name Tall Oaks to replace Johnson. The lack of support could be attributed to the fact that the school’s acronym would be TOES.
But the renaming committee said that could be considered a positive.
“The committee notes that Johnson almost never used the initials JES and that if Tall Oaks chooses to use its initials in the future, they could do so in the spirit of play and fun.”
If the names are adopted by late winter or early spring, Tall Oaks and Sunrise could go into effect as early as August 2025, according to the school division.
The cost of changing Clark and Venable’s names came out somewhere between $30,000 and $35,000, the school division estimated earlier this year when the signs came down. That estimate does not include the cost of purchasing new stationery, merchandise or floor mats that might bear the schools’ names.
Thursday’s school board meeting will be held at 5 p.m. in the Booker T. Reaves Media Center at Charlottesville High School.
Source: www.dailyprogress.com