RENAMING
People wanting to drop Stonewall say work being thwarted
Father Jose Rodriguez, whose church, Iglesia Jesus de Nazaret, sits less than two miles from Stonewall Jackson’s campus.
Rodriguez, who attended the school as a child, is among the community leaders who want the Confederate name — which he calls a “legacy of prejudice” — scrubbed from the school and replaced with Clemente’s name. He and others said they will also push Orlando to rename Stonewall Jackson Road, the street on which the middle school sits.
The Orange County School Board has indicated it wants to scrap the Jackson name but, to follow its policy, wants suggestions for a replacement to come from the school advisory council, based on feedback it receives from students and parents. Getting that has proved difficult.
Last year, the council suggested the school lop off “Stonewall” and be named simply Jackson Middle. That upset Rodriguez and other name-change advocates who said it wasn’t really a new name. School board members agreed and told the council to come back with another suggestion, with the goal of a new name being in place before the Aug. 10 start of the new school year. But the coronavirus pandemic delayed that effort in the spring when schools were shut down.
Last month, the advisory council initially picked a five-name survey list that excluded Clemente’s. Alianza for Progress, a group working to boost Puerto Rican and Latino involvement in civic issues, then wrote a letter to the school saying the group seemed to have “an antiLatino, anti-community, and anti-student attitude.”
The group and others noted that both a community survey and student essays showed Clemente was a top choice for a new school name.
The council on Monday voted to put out a survey seeking feedback on five potential new names, Clemente’s among them. But Tuesday, after hearing from some still unhappy community members, board members asked that the new survey not be sent out until the board can discuss it at its meeting Aug. 11.
The new survey — to be sent to parents and students at the middle school and its six feeder elementary schools — would have five options for a new name, the council decided: Simon Bolivar Middle School, Roberto Clemente Middle School, Diversity Middle School, Ellen Ochoa Middle School and Seminole Creek Middle School.
The names were among students’ Top 10 choices when earlier this year they wrote essays on renaming the school, Principal Betzabeth Reussow said Monday.
Starting in late 2019, Alianza surveyed residents who live near the school, asking parents and students about a new name for the middle school. Clemente, a Puerto Rican like many in the neighborhood, was the clear favorite.
The group has since printed and distributed yard signs that read, “I support Roberto Clemente Middle School #nameitclemente.”
Clemente, a star athlete and also a U.S. Marine, would be a fitting namesake for a school that now serves a student population that is 75% Hispanic and 14% percent Black, supporters say. The Orange school district has about 200 campuses, none named for a Hispanic person.
Clemente died in a plane crash in 1972 while trying to deliver supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake and was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame a year later.
“Being a Puerto Rican of African heritage,” Clemente’s name would stand in “very positive contrast to Stonewall Jackson and the negative stigma his name and legacy represent in a nation still ripped apart by racism,” said Marcos Vilar, Alianza’s executive director, in an email.
Stonewall Jackson opened in 1965 as an allwhite school, named for the Virginia general who died after a Civil War battle in that state in 1863.
Historians say whiterun, southern school boards gave schools Confederate leaders’ names to show displeasure after the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 school desegregation case.
Orange’s Robert E. Lee Middle School opened in 1956. The school board renamed it College Park Middle in 2017. That same year, Amman Thomas, whose two oldest children attended Stonewall Jackson, requested that name be changed, too. He said Monday he is happy the Jackson name, which he has called a “slap in the face” to Black students and parents, is likely to go, despite the drawn-out process.
Though not initially behind the push to rename the school in Clemente’s honor, he said at that meeting that choosing it would “be a really big home run” for the school district.
The nearly 3-year-old push to change the name of Stonewall Jackson Middle School has been embraced by Hispanic leaders who want the school renamed in honor of Roberto Clemente but also fear their efforts are being thwarted.
More than 60 people took part in Stonewall Jackson school advisory council’s online meeting this week, many signing in as “Roberto Clemente” to show their support for renaming the east Orlando school after the late baseball star.
Betsy Sanabria’s daughter will be an eighth grader at the school when classes begin Monday.
“She is all for Roberto Clemente,” as are her friends, Sanabria told the committee. “I’m not sure why if the students have chosen, why this process has taken so long?”
The effort to get rid of the Stonewall Jackson name began in late 2017. The school is now the only one in Central Florida named for a Confederate leader and, like other Confederate symbols, its name has faced renewed criticism in the wake of George Floyd’s death at the hands of Minneapolis police and the nationwide protests against racism that followed.
“Get rid of this name no school should open with,” said