The Shenandoah County School Board voted 5-1 early Friday morning to restore Confederate names to two schools there after they had previously been renamed four years earlier.
Mountain View High School will, as a result, once again be known as Stonewall Jackson High School, while Honey Run Elementary School will again be called Ashby-Lee Elementary School, named for Turner Ashby and Robert E. Lee. Both schools are in the Quicksburg area in the southern end of the county.
The yes votes came from board Chairman Dennis Barlow, Thomas Streett, Gloria Carlineo, Brandi Rutz and Michael Rickard. Board Vice Chairman Kyle Gutshall voted no. Board members supportive of changing the names of the schools back to what they were originally said the process to change the names in 2020 was rushed and did not have sufficient public input.
“It was not done properly,” Streett said. “It was done in a secretive [manner] in only nine days.” He called the vote to change the name in 2020 “a knee-jerk reaction.” Carlineo said her decision to change the names back came down to the process in how the two schools’ names were changed in the first place, saying it was done “under the cover of COVID.”
Gutshall called it a complex issue and said his district was overwhelmingly in favor of retaining the current names, and not reverting back to the Confederate names for the schools.
Streett made the motion for the name change, and Carlineo seconded it.
