Board explores name change for school
Orlando’s Stonewall Jackson Middle School — one of the few remaining public schools in Florida named for a Confederate war hero — could be in line for a new moniker.
The Orange County school district, in an online survey, is asking community members if they think the name should change and, if so, to what. Jackson Middle’s school advisory council, which requested the survey, will review the results and then decide whether to ask the Orange County School Board for a new name.
A year ago, the board voted to change the name of Robert E. Lee Middle School to College Park Middle School after a similar process. The two middle schools were the only ones in Central Florida named
for Confederate leaders. A handful of schools in Duval County and one in Pinellas County also bear Confederate leader names, according to the National Center for Education Statistics.
Jackson Middle sits on Stonewall Jackson Road in east Orlando in what is now a largely Hispanic neighborhood.
The online survey is available in both English and Spanish on the school’s website ( jacksonms.ocps.net), said spokeswoman Lorena Hitchcock.
The survey asks residents if they want a name change, if they would prefer to drop the “Stonewall” but keep Jackson Middle — which many people now call the school — or if they would like a completely new name. The survey includes space for people to make suggestions and to explain why they might want a new name.
The school’s principal does not want to comment so as not to sway the survey results, Hitchcock said.
Janak Gada, chairman of the advisory council, said the group started discussing the issue earlier in the school year, after a Jackson alumnus came to a meeting and requested the old name be dropped. Gada, who has a child at the school, said the council decided a public survey made sense. He also didn’t want to share his views while the survey is under way.
“We’ll present the results, and we’ll go from there,” he said.
School Board member Daryl Flynn, whose district includes Jackson, said two residents emailed her about that school’s name as the district was moving to abandon the Robert E. Lee name. One of them later spoke to the school advisory council.
Confederate names and statutes — which some view as symbols of slavery and white supremacy but others as key slices of American history — have been the source of intense scrutiny and debate nationwide since the June 2015 shooting deaths in a black church in Charleston, S.C. The convicted killer was a white supremacist who posed for photos with a Confederate flag.
School leaders in Oklahoma, Mississippi, Texas and Virginia are among those who’ve changed, or debated changing, school names that honored Lee, Jackson and Jefferson Davis, among other Southern leaders from the Civil War era.
A month after the shootings in Charleston, Orange Superintendent Barbara Jenkins ordered a sign depicting a caricature of General Lee removed from what was then his namesake school’s main building. A month later, a county teacher urged a name change for that school, and Lee Middle’s school advisory council began discussing the issue.
Orlando last year removed its “Johnny Reb” statue, a memorial to fallen Confederate soldiers, from Lake Eola Park to a new home at Greenwood Cemetery.
Southern schools named for Confederate war heroes typically got their names after the 1954 Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision that declared school segregation unconstitutional, historians have noted. The names were picked, they said, to highlight white-run school boards being upset with that decision.
What was then Robert E. Lee Junior High opened in 1956 as a whites-only school, with its mascot the “Rebels.” Stonewall Jackson Junior High School opened in 1965. The name was picked a year earlier, chosen over eight overs including that of Davis, the president of the Confederate States of America from 1861 to 1865.
Jackson Middle is one of nine schools in the country named for the Confederate military leader, according to the national center. One of the other namesake schools is in Jacksonville. Five are in Virginia — Jackson was a Virginian who died after a Civil War battle in that state in 1863 — and the other two in Texas and West Virginia.