In reversal, Virginia school board votes to restore Confederate names to 2 schools

A Virginia school board voted Friday to restore the names of Confederate military leaders to a high school and an elementary school, four years after the names had been removed, a reversal that some experts believe may be the first of its kind.

Shenandoah County’s school board voted 5-1 to rename Mountain View High School as Stonewall Jackson High School and Honey Run Elementary as Ashby Lee Elementary.

Friday’s vote reverses a decision by the school board in 2020, a time when school systems across Virginia and the South were removing Confederate names from schools and other public locations in response to the Black Lives Matter movement.

Rivka Maizlish, senior research analyst with the Southern Poverty Law Center’s Intelligence Project, which maintains a database of more than 2,000 Confederate memorials nationwide, said she is not aware of any other school that has decided to restore a Confederate name that was removed.

Overall, she said, the trend toward removal of Confederate names and memorials has continued, even if it has slowed somewhat since 2020. She noted that last year the Army renamed nine installations that were named for Confederate leaders, and the Army also removed a Confederate memorial from Arlington National Cemetery.

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