Woodstock, VA – On Thursday night citizens gathered outside the Shenandoah County School Board meeting to object to their appeal to the judge’s ruling to remove the confederate names from two schools. They chanted: “Hey, hey, ho ho! Confederate names have got to go!”
A previous school board had voted to rename the schools after the George Floyd protests in 2020. Stonewall Jackson High School became Mountain View High School, and Ashby-Lee Elementary became Honey Run Elementary. The changes to the schools had been implemented.
By 2024 the school board had enough new members to vote 5-1 to return to the confederate names. Black students sued the school board with the help of the NAACP because their civil rights had been violated. U.S. District Judge Michael Urbanski ruled the confederate names needed to be removed again, stating that their reverting back to the confederate names was an outcome-driven act of racial discrimination against Black students.
It’s estimated that if the school board proceeds with the appeal that would cost around $13 million dollars. The school board has claimed that the cost would be paid with private funds. The people gathered outside the meeting were skeptical that they would be able to raise those funds and that ultimately the cost would be passed onto them, leaving the schools underfunded.
Thirteen people were able to speak during the public comments against the appeal. One woman was denied being able to speak because she wasn’t a resident of Shenandoah County. She pays taxes on the real estate that she owns in Shenandoah County that supports the schools and she didn’t want the money wasted on an appeal. Her mother was a Daughter of the Confederacy but she is a lifetime member of the NAACP. She believes that it’s time to move forward in Christian love to make sure every student feels supported in the schools.
It was ironic that the board opened with a moment of silence to honor the one year anniversary of the killing of Charlie Kirk. He was a free speech advocate who believed in the importance of hearing all sides of an issue. Even though the woman who wasn’t a resident didn’t get to speak, the people who did covered all the points that she wanted to bring to their attention.
Dennis Atwood offered a reasonable solution that “the citizens who wish to honor traitors and slavers could use private donations to build and operate a private school.” They could rename it the Stonewall Jackson School and return the public schools’ names to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School.
Ernest Johns made a strong Christian case. He reminded the board that:
“Jesus warned us, ‘where your Treasure is, your Heart will be also.’… In Revelations, Jesus tells us ‘be hot or cold.’ the time of fence sitting and pretending to honor both as spiritual commitments is over…. We can’t love our fellow man while honoring those who enslaved them, or love America while fighting for traitors who sundered this country for the darkest evil. The errors of our youth cannot be our heritage or we have chosen perdition…. There simply is no version of Jesus that supports ‘the Lost Cause’”
Several students spoke during the public comments about the new school schedule and funding needs. None of them mentioned the name change. After the meeting was over, one student commented that there were other more important funding needs than wasting money on an appeal.
Even though not one person spoke in favor of the appeal, the school board voted unanimously to move forward with a program to implement the collection of funds for the appeal.
