The Coalition for Better Schools has raised more than $60,000 since its organizers started fundraising to help finance the restoration of names of Confederate generals to two schools in Shenandoah County, Virginia.
“We have raised over $60,000 and paid out over $52,000,” organizer Mike Scheibe told The Dallas Express about the effort to restore the names of Stonewall Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary. The schools’ names had been changed to Mountain View High and Honey Run Elementary, respectively. “We have team uniforms and the gym floors to pay for coming up.”
Most of the expense has gone to “signage, painting, clocks, [and] some uniforms,” he added. Scheibe anticipated that the largest cost would not be the signage but the uniforms, perhaps as much as “80% of costs in the end.”
“Nike uniforms add up, but [it] will still be way less expensive than the original name change [less than one-third],” he said.
The original name change cost “$304,000 … including $133,000 [the previous school board] took from Special Education funds,” claimed Scheibe. While only around $35,000 of the first name change’s costs came from private funding, he said restoring the Confederate generals’ names is being completely funded by private means. Moreover, the name restoration effort has been able to reduce costs in some places.
This is partly because the prior school board that had imposed the first name change on the district without public comment in the summer of 2020 had never fully completed the transition. “We reinstalled two exterior sets of letters on [Stonewall Jackson] High School and one on Ashby-Lee Elementary.”
While Ashby-Lee Elementary needed new signage for its new vestibule and the district’s scoreboard and athletic areas needed new emblems, some changes bore almost no cost. Ashby-Lee’s granite front sign had been merely covered with panels during the name change. These were removed, exposing the grey and red sign erected by the student council in 1993.
Similarly, Stonewall Jackson High’s signage also had its panels removed, revealing and restoring its former sign and nomenclature.
The NAACP of Virginia brought a lawsuit shortly after the school board voted to restore the Confederate generals’ names. It alleges that students’ First Amendment rights were being violated because the name reversal allegedly requires students “against their will to endorse the violent defense of slavery pursued by the Confederacy and the symbolism that these images have in the modern White supremacist movement,” according to the Associated Press.
Scheibe told DX that the Coalition for Better Schools is also paying “the $5,000 deductible for the attorney fighting the NAACP lawsuit.”
School board member Gloria Carlineo spoke with DX on the Cowtown Caller podcast before the lawsuit was announced. Although she obviously could not comment on the lawsuit that had yet to be filed, her previous comments rejected any racist associations with the names.
She pointed to the fact that Lee was an esteemed general who chose to protect Virginia despite his personal contempt for slavery because of his conviction that he could not fight against his own people in his home state.
Carlineo added that the slave population in her county, even at its peak, was minuscule, and the population of slave owners even smaller. With this in mind, she said she sees why so many common men who fought for the Confederacy from “the valley” would identify with Lee. For them, it was not about slavery but about home.
The rural Virginian community has continued to resoundingly reject the expulsion of their historic symbols and names. In the last four years, every school board member who voted to change Stonewall Jackson High and Ashby-Lee Elementary to Mountain View High and Honey Run Elementary has been replaced.
Nearly every member of the current board, including Carlineo, campaigned, at least in part, on restoring the names. Some school board members, like Tom Streett, a resident of the district where both schools are located, won in a landslide with 82% of the vote.
Other victories for the pro-name restoration side have included the school board’s recent unanimous vote to change the Shenandoah County Public Schools flag and decor policy to forbid political symbols and materials from classroom walls.
Moreover, trustee Brandi Rutz has called for an audit of how the 2020 name change was funded, The Freedom Press reported, and Scheibe said he believes it will happen.
