Wyn Delano
WMAL.com
MANASSAS (WMAL) — The Prince William County School Board will consider changing the names of a pair of schools named for Stonewall Jackson, a Confederate General.
The two schools, one a middle school and the other a high school, are both located in Manassas.
School Board Chairman Ryan Sawyers, speaking to WMAL’s “Mornings on The Mall” explained that, while he was inspired to introduce the proposal by recent events in Charlottesville, this was a conversation that had been ongoing long before that day:
“There are many residents of not only the Stonewall Jackson community, but Prince William County who are interested in seeing these wrongs being righted…its a conversation people want to have.”
It is the latest example of Charlottesville acting as a catalyst – pushing many municipalities into action to decide whether Confederate memorials and public buildings named after members of the Confederacy should still remain so.
What makes this particular name change unique, however, is that the current chair of the Prince William County Board of Supervisors is Corey Stewart – one of the most outspoken supporters of Confederate monuments and memorials in the country.
“Its not going to happen,” Stewart says. “As long as I’m governing Prince William County…there won’t be a single nickel of public money that will be used to rename this school.”
Stewart also claimed that renaming memorials and schools devoted to members of the Confederacy is equivalent to trying to change history:
“The population is absolutely opposed to this. People don’t want to do this. This is wrong to re-write history.”
Both those claims are disputed by Sawyer, who not only claims that there is strong “grassroots” support for the name change, but that the “re-writing” of history had already taken place:
“Let’s be perfectly clear – the whitewashing of history was when we named them this way in the first place. They were named not during the Confederacy – they weren’t named because some major battle took place on those sites or some historical relevance – they were named when massive resistors in Virginia and segregationists wanted to honor their own legacy and do it through naming things after confederate generals.”
This is not the first fight to change a controversial school name in the County.
Last year, the name of Mills Godwin Middle School was changed to Hampton Middle School in a controversial vote by the School Board.
Mills Godwin, a former Governor of Virginia, was a segregationist.
The cost for name changes such as the one Sawyer is proposing often prove to be a sticking point with critics, with speculative costs that run into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
However, in this case, there is a solid reference:
“It cost about $225,000 – $250,000 dollars to rename [Mills Godwin] Middle School last year,” Sawyer said.
He added that the high school may cost significantly more due to “greater branding” at that level of facility.
All in all, the number that the school board is eyeing in funding totals out to about $750,000.
This cost has been used by Stewart as a threat to hopefully prevent the change from going forward.
He vowed that if the name change vote went forward, “[The Board of Supervisors] will reduce their budget by the same amount that they would use to change the name of the school.”
Sawyer wasn’t fazed by this threat when he was confronted with it,
“They reduce our budget all the time – regardless of whether we’re re-naming schools or not…we’re pretty used to that.”
He also added that it is outside the constitutional authority of the Board of Supervisors to determine how the school board spend their money.
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