Four schools will be renamed for a mix of geographic landmarks and prominent Black women under a proposal unveiled Tuesday at a Newport News School Board meeting:
Epes Elementary would become Stoney Run Elementary, for the body of water behind it. There are several developments and an athletic complex nearby with the same name.
Lee Hall Elementary would become Katherine Johnson Elementary, named for the famed NASA Langley mathematician who died last year. Her work helped launch the first American crewed spaceflights.
R. O. Nelson Elementary would become Knollwood Meadows Elementary, named for the Denbigh neighborhood where it’s located.
Dozier Middle will become Ella Fitzgerald Middle. Fitzgerald was born in Newport News and is one of the most popular female jazz singers of all time.
The recommendations from Superintendent George Parker were picked from a pool of 12 from a task force, which in turn narrowed 230 nominations from community members. The School Board will have the final say.
The School Board voted in September to rename the schools, whose namesakes have ties to the Confederacy and segregation. They make up the first tier of a group of 10 schools whose namesakes school staff flagged after board members asked them to investigate.
John Marshall Dozier Jr. was board chairman and Robert Oliver Nelson was superintendent in the city during Massive Resistance, when districts statewide avoided following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Brown v. Board of Education desegregating schools. Epes is named for Horace Epes, who briefly fought for the Confederacy and was the first principal of Newport News High School.
The 15-member school Diversity and Inclusion Task Force first met in November and began developing a set of name criteria, which the board approved in February. The policy allows schools to be named for one of several categories, including geography and honoring a person, keeping in mind “the values of diversity and inclusion.”
The district ran a survey in March to solicit suggestions from the community, mostly from employees, families and other community members. Principals also polled their students. The task force then narrowed those to three per school.
Parker’s selections weren’t necessarily the most popular nominations for the schools. Beechwood was more popular for Nelson Elementary, but the school technically in the Knollwood Meadows neighborhood.
Lucas Creek was a more popular name among students and community members for Nelson Elementary, for a nearby road and creek. The task force thinks it’s named for one of the 19th century Mennonite families in the area, but because they couldn’t find which one, Parker chose Stoney Run instead.
Renaming the schools is expected to cost about $590,000, according to numbers presented to the School Board. That includes changing the signs at the schools, changing names in cafeterias, replacing stationery and banners and relabeling library books.
The task force will next turn its attention to the second and third tiers of schools Parker and his staff have identified.
The second tier includes schools named for plantations or communities named for plantations: Denbigh High School, Denbigh Early Childhood Center and Richneck Elementary School. The third tier is made of schools named for school leaders who presided over segregated schools: Yates Elementary, B.C. Charles Elementary and Saunders Elementary.
The School Board will vote on the names proposed by Parker at its May 18 meeting. After the vote, the district’s plant services department will start working on changing signs.
