Orlando Sentinel

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- lpostal@orlandosen­tinel.com

the school for Roberto Clemente, the late baseball star — and then suggest a new name to the board.

The board’s goal was to pick a new name before the 2020-21 school year started in August.

But then the pandemic shuttered school campuses in midMarch, and the committee decided to postpone the survey until the new school year started, officials said.

“A date has not been scheduled yet, but I do foresee it will be a speedy process when we return back to school,” said William Bohn, an Orange area superinten­dent whose district includes the middle school, in an email.

In recent weeks, as protests over the death of George Floyd in Minneapoli­s have roiled the nation, some have turned their anger on Confederat­e symbols and monuments, which have been removed, torn down or defaced in cities across the South. Jacksonvil­le, for example, has removed a Confederat­e memorial to the Confederac­y from a downtown park, and NASCAR announced the Confederat­e flag would be banned from its races.

Stonewall Jackson Middle in Orlando opened as an all-white institutio­n in 1965. The school’s population is now about 74% Hispanic and 14% black.

Historians say white-run school boards in the South gave schools confederat­e leader names starting in the mid-1950s to show displeasur­e with the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision striking down school segregatio­n.

Orange’s Robert E. Lee Jr. High School, now called College Park Middle School, opened in the 1955-56 school year.

When Stonewall Jackson was to to open about a decade later, the Orange school board also considered naming the school after Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederac­y, according to a 1964 Orlando Sentinel story. Instead, it choose to honor Jackson, a Virginian and Civil War general who died after a battle in that state in 1863.

Lee Middle’s name change was sparked by the 2015 shootings at a black church in Charleston, S.C. The confessed killer, who is white, was photograph­ed with Confederat­e and white supremacis­t flags before he shot to death nine black parishione­rs. Those killings prompted nationwide scrutiny of visible legacies of the Confederac­y.

In 2018, the city of Orlando removed a memorial to Confederat­e war dead from Lake Eola park. That same year, discussion­s began about dropping the Jackson name, and a survey done by the advisory committee showed community support for a change.

“The symbolism of the role that General Stonewall Jackson played in the Confederat­e Army to uphold slavery and segregatio­n in the South ... must be completely removed from society as it exists today,” one resident wrote on the survey.

But when the advisory committee did a second survey to come up with a proposed new name, the most popular suggestion was to lop off “Stonewall” and call the school simply Jackson Middle, as many do anyway.

That upset some residents as well as school board member Johanna Lopez, whose district includes the school’s neighborho­od. They said Jackson wasn’t a new name and would leave the school, located on Stonewall Jackson Road, still honoring a hero of the Confederac­y.

Superinten­dent Barbara Jenkin’s staff agreed the advisory council had failed to suggest a new name, leaving the board to vote between Stonewall Jackson and Jackson. So in February, the board told the committee to conduct a new survey and then propose a new name. But now that survey now won’t happen until at least August, officials said.

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