As most probably know and as I alluded to in a post about Tom Conlon two days ago, our school board has decided to unnamed the school at 707 Holly from Daniel Webster and name it after Barack and Michelle Obama.
I suggested a more cautious approach for the renaming earlier. Somebody has contacted me offline to suggest that I missed an important point that renamings generally ignore:
Once you name something after someone[s] you make it more unlikely that something else will be named for him/her/them.
The President and First Lady now will have a school named for them. There is a chance that in a decade or so, when they might otherwise have been in a position to have something better named for them and that they won’t be in the running for that honor.
And, now that the District is in an unnaming mood, what school might be next? Daniel Webster was not a perfect person, but there are schools in our city named after much less deserving people. Andrew Jackson was a slave owner who relocated and slaughtered native Americans. Yet we have a school in Frogtown [with high populations of both of these minority groups] which has been carrying his name for generations. And maybe Warren Harding warrants a school, but a major high school??
School board members work hard for little pay. They are responsible for large budgets for which funding sources often give them little leeway in how they are spent. They have no independent staff to give them the answers to the questions they feel they need. I do not wish to make their work any harder, but maybe they really should start looking at what else needs to be unnamed now.
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