SHENANDOAH COUNTY, Va. (ROCKTOWN NOW) – Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School in Shenandoah County will go back to their original names honoring two Confederate officers, after they were changed nearly four years ago.

The Shenandoah County School Board moved to restore the school names in a 5-1 vote early Friday morning, effectively changing both of the Quicksburg schools from Mountain View back to Stonewall Jackson High and Honey Run back to Ashby-Lee Elementary, respectively. In July 2020, the schools underwent a renaming amid the reckoning of racial injustice in the U.S., following the murder of George Floyd by a white police officer.

The school board at the time voted 5-1 to drop the names honoring famed Confederate officers Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson for the high school and both Turner Ashby and Robert E. Lee for the elementary school. The school names were revisited two years later when the board voted 3-3 to keep the Mountain View and Honey Run names, although three of the members who voted in favor of the new names have since left the school board.

The Coalition for Better Schools, on behalf of residents in the Southern Campus community of Shenandoah County, prompted the push to restore the Confederate names with a letter to the School Board. The group also distributed a survey throughout the county, which only 13 percent responded to, with results showing that more than 90 percent of respondents were in favor of changing the names back.

While some board members supported the name change for the county’s heritage in connection with the Civil War and their obligation to act in the will of their constituents. However, the five board members who voted for the change also stated that they intended to remedy the actions of the 2020 School Board while they convened remotely due to COVID-19 precautions.

School board member Gloria Carlineo, who represents District 3, claimed the former board’s initial vote for the name change was in bad faith.

“To me, there is absolutely no question that it was done intentionally over seven days during the Fourth of July weekend under the cover of COVID to ignore the feedback of the community,” Carlineo said. “This was not an innocent mistake by some inexperienced school board – no, this was the carefully choreographed machinations of a school board colluding to ignore the people they represented. This is what political indoctrination in our schools looks like.”

Vice Chairman Kyle Guttshall, who cast the lone dissenting vote, said it was a complicated issue, but he felt an obligation to the people in his district who were increasingly for keeping the new names, despite his vote in 2022 to restore the old names.

“Ultimately, for me, it was a tough decision,” Guttshall said. “My district has been overwhelmingly in support of keeping the names the way they are. I’m not going to be a hypocrite and ignore the majority like they did in 2020.”

Hours of Public Comment

The vote followed a lengthy public comment period that dominated the first half of the meeting, which ran just over six hours Thursday night.

Several dozen people in the packed room approached the board, with a seemingly even-weighted split between those who supported restoring the Confederate names and those who supported keeping the new names. Some board members, including Edinburg resident Stuart Didawick, expressed their disapproval of the original vote.

“When you vote on the name restoration, will you listen to woke outsiders, or will you listen to the voices of the people who elected you to represent them?” Didawick asked the board. “This board has a moral and ethical obligation to the citizens you represent to undo the dirtiest, most underhanded stunt in the history of Shenandoah County politics.”

Others, like Fred Niece, urged the board to consider the heritage of residents in the southern part of Shenandoah County.

“Some people say they take offense to the school names, but I’m offended by the scarring of the good name of our ancestors,” Niece said. “Please do what’s right for Shenandoah County and restore our names, our history, and our heritage.”

For Virginia Rosen, restoring the names was a question of morality.

“I’m fed up with people lying about how our schools were named, and it’s really rich when people lecture me about morality but excuse the actions of the 2020 school board,” Rosen said. “I don’t like the name ‘Mountain View;’ it’s too generic and it’s boring, and ‘Honey Run,’ sounds like the name of a moonshine operation.”

Many of the residents who spoke in support of the current school names called out the Confederate names’ association with the county’s history of slavery and the Jim Crow-era laws that tormented Black Americans in the century following the Civil War. Gene Kilby, the son of Virginia civil rights activist James Wilson Kilby, spoke about his experience during the desegregation of public schools.

“I stand before you tonight to support the pledge that this county made in 1964 to support civil rights,” Kilby said. “Were these just gestures at the time, or did the school board really mean it?”

Caroline Chilton, a graduate of Stonewall Jackson High School, showed up in her school letterman jacket in support of keeping the names on behalf of her former class.

“I am asking tonight that you let stand the names of Mountain View and Honey Run and look for compromise in the future, so we can continue the task of making this a better county for all,” Chilton said. “Where some of us get what we want, all of us get what we don’t want, and none of us have a stomachache anymore.”

Tensions rose at the meeting when Stephanie Bullock Smith, a Black graduate of Stonewall Jackson High School, spoke in favor of the school’s more inclusive current names and also accused School Board member Thomas Streett of a racist attack against her brother while they were in high school.

“He was spit in the face and called a n—-r by a School Board member today, and people need to know that, because no one who does that should be serving in public office,” Smith said. “You never apologized to my brother.”

After the public comment period, Streett denied the accusations.

“I just wanted to point out the false accusations made against me are not true,” Streett said. “During that time period, if it happened, they got the wrong Streett, and that Streett is deceased now.”

Next Steps

The motion to restore the original names required that the funds be provided by private donations and not taxpayer money. The initial name change in 2020 reportedly cost around $300,000.