The Shenandoah County School Board will vote Thursday whether to restore the names of two schools in the southern end of the county that were once named after Confederate generals.

The meeting is scheduled for 7 p.m. Thursday in the cafetorium at Peter Muhlenberg Middle School, 1251 Susan Ave., in Woodstock. Due to the expected size of the crowd, speakers during the public comment portion of the meeting will be allotted two minutes instead of the usual three.

In 2020, the school board renamed Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby Lee Elementary School, both in Quicksburg, to Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School.

The decision, the school board said at the time, was made in an effort to condemn racism and affirm the school division’s commitment to an inclusive environment for all.

Thursday will not be the first time the school board has voted to restore the former names. A 2022 vote failed in a 3-3 tie, with current board members Dennis Barlow, Kyle Gutshall and Brandi Rutz voting to restore the original names. The three members who voted against restoring the names have since left the board and been replaced by Thomas Streett, Gloria Carlineo and Michael Rickard, who all won election in November.

Asked how he may vote on Thursday, Barlow, the board’s chairman, told the Daily he has “a particular problem with the method by which the previous board made the name-change decision.” He described the past board’s actions surrounding the name changes as “deceitful, undemocratic and disdainful of the community it served.”

“I think that methodology — and its consequences — needs to be addressed,” he said.

Barlow expressed a similar sentiment during an April 22 work session, saying the vote to change the names in summer of 2020 was non-essential business, meaning it should have never happened during the pandemic. He also said the decision to change the names bypassed the opinions of the public.

Earlier this year, the Coalition for Better Schools distributed a survey to several thousand county residents, asking which names they preferred. Of the 8,507 surveys mailed, 1,160 people responded with 90% choosing the Confederate names. The surveys were primarily mailed to houses in the southern end of the county — District 1, District 2 and around Edinburg in District 3. The coalition requested that the board vote again to restore the former names. The board listened to the public’s comments — both for and against restoring the names — during a hearing on April 11.

Mike Scheibe, the coalition’s spokesperson, told the Daily that restoring the old names will lessen division in the county. He said many constituents were more upset with the process of how the names were changed than with the new names themselves.

“When the names were changed in 2020, it woke up the people in Shenandoah County,” Scheibe said. “The name change made people look at the schools [at the time] and noticed they were not in good shape.”

Conversely, Sarah Kohrs — who attended Ashby Lee and graduated from Stonewall Jackson in 1997 — spoke against the name restorations at the board’s April 11 meeting. Kohrs told the Daily she was “heartbroken” for her African American and Hispanic American neighbors in the county.

“Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School are bucolic, noncontroversial public school names,” Kohrs said. “They don’t exude politics and they welcome everyone, regardless of heritage and race. It is unsupportable in 2024 for our leaders to revert to names of Confederate leaders, whose examples of disloyalty to the USA and conscientious decisions to fight for states’ rights to choose slavery as a morally acceptable economic means.”

DeLois Warr, an African American who integrated into Stonewall Jackson High School in 1964 and graduated in 1966, told the Daily she felt African Americans’ perspectives have been missing when talking about student experiences at Stonewall Jackson High School.

“I used to go to all of the meetings, but it felt as if nobody ever listened to us,” Warr said.

After the 2020 decision, there were $304,284 in expenses related to the name change, such as changing the signage on the schools. That included $137,362 for new athletic uniforms.

If the old names are restored, Scheibe said the coalition would raise private funds to help pay for new signage and other related costs. Restoring the names, he said, will cost $120,000-$150,000. Athletic uniforms, he said, will continue having “Generals” written on it instead of “Stonewall Jackson.”