Orange board drops Stonewall Jackson name
District to change middle school moniker to Roberto Clemente
Stonewall Jackson Middle School was renamed Roberto Clemente Middle School on Tuesday, as the Orange County
School Board voted to drop the name of the Confederate general from the east Orlando school.
The middle school — opened 55 years ago as a whites-only school but now with a majority Hispanic student population — was the only campus in Central Florida still named for a Confederate general.
The board voted unanimously to adopt the Clemente name for the school.
“Definitely aye!” said school board member Kat Gordon as she cast her vote. “This is history in the making.”
Clemente, inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, was a star athlete and a U.S. Marine. The Puerto Rican native died in 1972 while trying to deliver relief supplies to Nicaragua after an earthquake.
Board members, community leaders and parents who pushed for the change all said they were happy the school would no longer be named for Jackson, a Virginian who died in that state in 1863 after a Civil War battle.
“As an African American, as an American descended from slaves, the name Stonewall Jackson is extremely offensive to me,” said Amman Thomas, whose two oldest children attended the school.
He began the renaming push in late 2017 when he asked the school advisory council to recommend a change.
“It’s good to see three years later that a lot has changed. It’s been a long road, but it is done,” Thomas told the board Tuesday.
“It took way longer than it needed to,” Chair Teresa Jacobs said.
“This has been an extensive and highly emotional process,” agreed board member Johanna Lopez, whose district includes the middle school.
Hispanic leaders rallied behind the name-change effort and viewed Clemente as a fitting substitute for a school that now serves a student population that is 75% Hispanic and 14% Black. Also, they noted, Orange County Public Schools has about 200 campuses, but until Tuesday none named for a Hispanic person.
In recent months, those who lobbied for the Clemente name even distributed yard signs that read “I support Roberto Clemente Middle School” and featured a photo of the late baseball star.
Right after the vote, Superintendent Barbara Jenkins told the board she messaged facility staff and told them “put the name on the school ASAP.”
It will cost OCPS about $20,000 to change signs on the school, replace the logo in the gym floor, order new sports uniforms and get rid of other items that now bear the Jackson name.
The new name was selected from three suggestions sent to the school board by Stonewall Jackson’s school advisory council: Diversity Middle School, Roberto Clemente Middle School and Seminole Creek Middle School.
The choices came after students wrote essays suggesting new names and their top five choices were put in a survey sent to parents, students, staff and community members.
Roberto Clemente Middle was the favorite name in the survey, winning 70% of the votes. The survey, done last month, was completed by nearly 4,000 people.
The school opened in 1965. Historians say whiterun, southern school boards gave schools Confederate leaders’ names to show their displeasure with the U.S. Supreme Court ’s landmark 1954 school desegregation case.
What was then Robert E. Lee Middle School opened in 1956 in Orlando’s College Park neighborhood, an allwhite school with the nickname the Rebels.
The school board renamed it College Park Middle School in 2017.
That name change came in the wake of the June 2015 shooting deaths in a black church in Charleston, South Carolina.
The convicted killer was a white supremacist who posed in photos with a Confederate flag. The shooting prompted intense debate about Confederate names and statutes — which some view as symbols of slavery and white supremacy but others as key slices of American history.
The process to rename Stonewall Jackson Middle took longer, delayed in part because the school advisory council — tasked with making the name change proposal to the school board — last year recommended the school board lop off “Stonewall” but still call the school Jackson Middle.
The school board rejected that plan, saying that wouldn’t amount to a new name, and asked for a new community survey and then new name suggestions. That was then delayed by the coronavirus pandemic and school closures.
This summer, the Jackson 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 and Confederate symbols that followed.
“We set out to bring down an unjust name,” said Father Jose Rodriguez, whose church, Iglesia Jesus de Nazaret, sits less than two miles from the campus, who attended the school as a child and who helped lead the effort to replace the Jackson name with Clemente’s.
The new name, he said, is one “our children can look up to.”
The school sits on Stonewall Jackson Road, and Rodriguez and others have said they are pushing for that to be changed, too.