After an hour-long discussion Tuesday that included several failed amendments, the School Board voted 8-1 to move forward with the potential renaming of nine schools.
The board also directed the staff to create two naming committees at the start of the 2024-2025 school year to consider renaming Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School and Mercer Middle School. The board also requested a timeline for the potential renaming of the reaming seven additional schools.
The nine schools being considered for renaming were identified after the previous School Board in 2020 initiated a review of school names and mascots that could be associated with systemic racism.
Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School is named after a local woman who worked at theLoudoun Timesnewspaper for 73 years. She was known for her commitment to promoting Loudoun County’s history and was a member of the Daughters of the Confederacy when she was a young woman. Mercer Middle School is named after lawyer and politician Charles Fenton Mercer who was a founding member of the American Colonization Society that advocated resettling those freed from slavery on the west coast of Africa in the period before the Civil War, according to History Matters LLC.
The renaming of Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School and Mercer Middle School will begin in August with a community survey, followed by nominations for a renaming committee.
Lauren Shernoff (Leesburg) requested that a new town hall meeting be held as part of the review for Frances Hazel Reid.She said the previous community meeting was not well attended and was not recorded. All School Board members with the exception of Deana Griffiths (Ashburn) agreed to that request.
Once the naming committees are formed, those panels will bring at least two names for the board to consider. The board is not bound to change the name and may keep it the same name under a policy adopted by the previous School Board, according to Chief Operations Officer Kevin Lewis.
The whole process is expected to take up to 36 weeks.
Lewis said the division wouldn’t incur any more costs in the process because the histories of the schools had already been compiled.
History Matters was hired in 2020 to look for schools named for Confederate leaders or the Confederate cause, people who lived in the 17th, 18thand 19thcenturies when slavery was part of the economic, cultural and political systems in Virginia, and any facilities named for individuals or movements that promoted segregation.
The initial name review was divided into three phases. Phase one was any school that might meet the criteria. Phase two was for schools named after a person. Phase three was schools named for places, ideals or inanimate objects.
The nine schools up for potential renaming are Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School, Mercer Middle School, Emerick Elementary School, all named after people;Belmont Ridge Middle School, Belmont Station Elementary School, Seldens Landing Elementary School, Sully Elementary School, Hutchison Farm Elementary School, all named after places affiliated with slavery; and Ball’s Bluff Elementary School, named after a Civil War battle won by the Confederate Army.
The review determined there were no schools in Loudoun named after Confederate leaders or the Confederate cause. However, work by theBlack History Committee resulted in a recommendation in 2022 to consider changing the names of 10 schools from the first two phases of the reviewincluding four named for people and six for places. John Champe High School, named for a Revolutionary War cavalryman, was removed from the list Oct. 25, 2022, to allow for additional research by the Black History Committee.
The School Board also in October 2022 unanimously amended its school naming policyto, among other things, allow it to move forward with renaming the nine schools and to allow a renaming committee to choose to the keep the school’s name.
Town Hall meetings were held in December 2022 to hear from the Mercer Middle School and Frances Hazel Reid Elementary School communities. The former board discussed appointing a renaming committee in February of last year for the two schools, which included a recommendation to keep the name of Mercer Middle School and create a permanent exhibit at the school to tell the history—both good and bad—of the school’s namesake.The board voted to postpone action until September 2023, but didn’t move forward with it before its term ended.
No schools have been renamed to date; however, Loudoun County High School’s mascot was changed in 2020 from the Raiders—a reference to John Mosby’s Confederate cavalryunit—to the Captains. That change cost the division about $640,000, less than an original estimate of up to 1.5 million provided by staff during a May 7 Finance and Operations Committee meeting.
