Panel: School should be renamed
Stonewall Jackson Middle to lose Confederate name
Stonewall Jackson Middle School, the only remaining public school in Central Florida bearing the name of a Confederate leader, should drop that full moniker and be known simply as Jackson Middle, its advisory council has decided.
The school, which sits on
Stonewall Jackson Road in east Orlando, has been considering a name change for nearly three years.
The move to abandon the old name, like other recent debates
about the appropriateness of Confederate memorials, came in the wake of the 2015 mass shooting at a black church in Charleston by a white supremacist who posed for photos with the Confederate flag.
The school advisory council came to its decision after surveying parents, students and community members first about whether they wanted a name change (they did) and then more recently what new name they preferred (Jackson Middle, without “Stonewall”), said Rolando Sanz-Guerrero, the panel’s chairman.
“In my mind, we got good results,” he said.
After voting to recommend Jackson Middle become its official name, the council sent its proposal to Superintendent Barbara Jenkins who likely will soon ask for a vote by the Orange County School Board. The school board, which has final say on school names, meets next on Nov. 12.
During its discussions, the advisory council heard from some offended by the Stonewall name, and others who didn’t want a change, Sanz-Guerrero said, and also reviewed information from both surveys.
The first survey showed support for a new name, with one respondent saying they wanted a name that didn’t invoke “slavery and segregation in the South.” The second survey, conducted at the end of last school year, offered five options for a new name, based on the popularity of suggestions made earlier.
It showed 64% wanted the school called Jackson Middle.
Sanz-Guerrero said the choice made sense to him in part because that is what most already call the school. “Very few people have been calling it Stonewall Jackson,” he said.
The school’s marquee, the logo on the school’s newsletter and many other items already read just Jackson Middle, though one wall near the school’s entrance is painted with the full name.
In his view, dropping Stonewall would give the school a generic name unattached to any particular person, or controversy, Sanz-Guerrero said. It also would mean the school didn’t need to replace so many things, from sports uniforms to doormats, already branded with the school name.
Amman Thomas, whose two older children attended the school and whose youngest might next year, got the name-change effort underway when he asked in 2017 that the school consider scrapping its ties to Stonewall Jackson, a Confederate general from Virginia who died in 1863.
He told the council that as a black man he found the name “distasteful” and not representative of the diversity that is 21st century Orlando. The school now sits in a largely Hispanic neighborhood, with a student enrollment that is 75 percent Hispanic and 13 percent black.
Thomas said he appreciated that the advisory council had pursued the effort but wished it had voted to do away with the full Jackson name. The school still sits on Stonewall Jackson Road, so the Jackson name will remain lashed to the Confederate general.
“In essence, to me, that is still de facto Stonewall Jackson,” Thomas said.
He knows no one, including his children, calls the school by its full name, but that doesn’t change its meaning. “You’re missing the point,” he said. “The school should not be named that at all.”
Confederate names and statues — 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 Charleston shooting, which left nine people dead.
Since then, school leaders in Texas, Oklahoma and Virginia, among other places, have opted to remove Confederate leaders’ names from public schools.
Soon after the shooting, Jenkins ordered a sign depicting Robert E. Lee removed from the outside of what was then Robert E. Lee Middle School in Orlando. The sign on the main building showed the school’s mascot, a cartoon version of the Confederate army leader.
The Orange school board renamed the school College Park Middle School in 2017, at the request of that school advisory council.
That year, a cannon, loaned to Lee Middle by a chapter of the United Daughters of the Confederacy that had sat on the campus, was moved to Greenwood Cemetery. That is also where in 2017 Orlando moved its “Johnny Reb” statute, a memorial to fallen from Confederate soldiers, that had been in Lake Eola Park, the centerpiece of downtown.
Many public schools in the South named for Confederate leaders were assigned those names by white-run school boards after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 school desegregation case. The names showed the white community’s power and its resistance to integration, historians say.
Orange’s Robert E. Lee opened in 1956. It was a whites-only school, with the nickname “the Rebels” and its band members wearing Confederate army style uniforms. An Orlando Sentinel photo from that year shows students raising a Confederate flag on the flagpole of the new campus.
The name Stonewall Jackson is found on six other public schools nationwide, one in Jacksonville, four in Virginia and one in West Virginia, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. The Lee name is on 13 schools nationwide, with Robert E. Lee High School in Jacksonville the only remaining one in Florida, the center’s data shows.