'Justice' prevails in Falls Church

High school students in the Seven Corners and Lake Barcroft areas of Falls Church will soon no longer attend J.E.B. Stuart High School as their predecessors for the past 58 years have done. They will instead go to Justice High School.

The Fairfax County School Board approved the new name in a 7-4 vote on Oct. 26, bringing an end to a polarizing debate that started in 2015 with a handful of Stuart students campaigning for change.

Proposed by Mason District representative Sandy Evans, Justice High replaces the moniker of a Confederate general that name change proponents argued alienated the school’s ethnically diverse student population by honoring the legacy of a man who fought to preserve slavery.

“It is important that our schools, in name and symbol, honor and value the diverse student population they serve today,” school board chair Jane Strauss said. “…The name Justice High School honors our core belief in equity and inclusion, and individual heroes who fought for justice, civil rights and quality education.”

Evans suggested Justice High School as a possible substitute for J.E.B. Stuart because it could serve as a variation on former Supreme Court Justice Thurgood C. Marshall, whose name emerged as the second-highest vote-getter in a community poll conducted on Sept. 16.

School board members who supported Evans’s motion saw Justice High as a way to avoid mix-ups with George C. Marshall High School, which is also in Falls Church, while acknowledging civil rights activist Barbara Rose Johns and World War II Army veteran Col. Louis G. Mendez Jr., two other individuals who garnered significant support in the community vote.

Strauss, Providence District representative Dalia Palchik, Hunter Mill District representative Pat Hynes, and all three at-large board members voted in favor of Evans’s motion.

Braddock District representative Megan McLaughlin, Lee District representative Tamara Derenak Kaufax, Springfield District representative Elizabeth Schultz, and Sully District representative Thomas Wilson all opposed the motion.

Board vice chair and Mount Vernon District representative Karen Corbett Sanders was absent from the table at the time of the vote after leaving to travel for an out-of-town meeting, according to The Washington Post.

“This has been a long process, but at the end of the day, we did the right thing,” Evans said. “I feel that we did do the best thing for the name.”

The board directed Fairfax County Public Schools (FCPS) Superintendent Scott Brabrand and his staff to develop a plan for implementing the name change to Justice High that will be presented to the school board on Dec. 14.

The board’s 7-4 vote did not occur until almost midnight after its 12 members discussed possible new names for J.E.B. Stuart High School at length and proposed several substitute motions and amendments.

Wilson moved that the board change the school’s name simply by removing the J.E.B., noting that Stuart High School had garnered the most points in the Sept. 16 community vote.

As Brabrand told the board in a Sept. 28 presentation, FCPS staff estimated that eliminating the J.E.B. would cost $512,572 in comparison to the $800,620 expense that a complete name change would require.

In separate substitute motions, Schultz, who supported Wilson’s motion as well, suggested Barbara Rose Johns High School and Col. Louis G. Mendez Jr. High School as preferable to Justice.

All three motions for an alternative to Justice High School failed.

Schultz argues that Mendez, a 60-year resident of the Lake Barcroft area of Latino and Navajo descent who had children that attended J.E.B. Stuart, would have been the best choice of the suggested individuals for a school whose student body is nearly 55 percent Hispanic.

“Naming the school for Col. Mendez would have been an authentic option for healing for the JEB Stuart students and members of the surrounding community,” the Springfield District representative wrote in an Oct. 30 email to the Fairfax County Times. “The lost opportunity by this board is tragic.”

Schultz says she proposed Johns as the new name in response to an email she received that day from a member of the Fairfax County NAACP who had requested that the board seriously consider the Virginia civil rights pioneer’s name.

“He could find no quarter with anyone else on the board,” Schultz said of the email writer. “…I understood the frustration behind his request, which was reasonable and felt it needed to be part of our discussion that evening.”

Evans says that she decided on Justice High as the best option for her main motion after extensive conversations with her fellow board members.

When the board approved a name change for J.E.B. Stuart High School in a 7-2 vote on July 27, the successful motion written by Evans explicitly requested that the community consider “Stuart High School” as the new name.

However, the Mason District representative later heard from name change advocates that simply removing the “J.E.B.” would not constitute a sufficient change.

“The harmony that we thought could possibly develop with that one name, it didn’t happen,” Evans said. “…[Justice] seemed like the best compromise that would get a majority support from the board.”

Many advocates of changing the name pushed for Johns, in part because Fairfax County currently does not have any high schools named after a person of color or woman.

As a high school student in Virginia’s Prince Edward County, Johns led a strike in 1951 to protest the poor conditions of her all-black school in a case that ultimately became part of the Brown v. Board of Education decision that declared segregation unconstitutional.

“We believe Barbara Rose Jones would have sent a clearer and stronger message about inclusivity and appreciation for women and the ongoing struggle for equality on all fronts,” Fairfax County NAACP president Kofi Annan said in a statement from the organization, a prominent supporter of the “Change the Name” campaign. “Nevertheless, we commend Sandy Evans, Karen Keys-Gamarra and the other school board members that voted in favor of this change. It is definitely a great symbolic gesture that the county hears and is responsive to our concerns.”

Opponents of the J.E.B. Stuart name change reiterated criticisms of the school board’s decision and the process used to reach that decision that they have vocalized since FCPS convened a public meeting at the Falls Church school to solicit community input on the proposed name change on May 23, 2016.

“Keep the Name” proponents say the board has forced a new school name on a community that largely had no desire for such a change, citing a survey conducted from May 12 to May 20, 2016 that found 56 percent of 3,500 respondents did not support a change compared to the 35 percent who did.

“It just became very clear that the board, specifically Sandy Evans, was disinterested in engaging the community’s will or even attempting to follow the community’s will,” Christian Barbosa, who graduated from Stuart in 2011 and still lives in the neighborhood, said. “They were trying to justify their own political methods and ideas with community input, and when those didn’t match up, they rejected the community input.”

Barbosa has been an opponent of changing the name since the issue first came up, but he says that, if the name had to change, he hoped the board would choose Stuart High School, since it led the community vote and would have been cheaper.

“I wasn’t surprised, but I was disappointed,” Barbosa said of the approval of Justice High School.

A petition started on the website Change.org by J.E.B. Stuart High School student Haseeb Khan has gotten 1,346 signatures as of Wednesday afternoon.

“This vote was against the vote the students made and was a violation of the students’ voices,” Khan said in the petition, which calls for J.E.B. Stuart’s name to be reinstated. “The board is going against their own policy and is picking on only one school.”

FCPS Regulation 8170.7 outlines the process for renaming a school. The policy dictates that community meetings for soliciting possible new names should be open to the general public, but the actual voting on the suggested names must be restricted to participants who live within the school’s attendance area.

For renaming J.E.B. Stuart, FCPS scheduled a community meeting for Sept. 9, and a vote on the suggestions provided in that meeting was held on Sept. 16.

Brabrand presented his recommendation to the school board based on the community’s input on Sept. 28, suggesting that the board consider the five suggestions with the most points, including Stuart, the three aforementioned individuals, and Peace Valley High School, a reference to the street where J.E.B. Stuart is located.

The regulation text, which can be found on the FCPS website, does not explicitly obligate the school board to adhere to the results of a community vote when choosing a new school name.

Disapproval of the name change has primarily been directed at Evans, since the Stuart community falls within her district.

One website is calling for the Fairfax County Circuit Court to remove the Mason District representative from office for demonstrating “neglect of duty, misuse of office and incompetence in the performance of her required duties as a school board member.”

The site shows that the recall campaign is being spearheaded by the Citizens for Government Integrity LLC, a company based at Seven Corners in Falls Church that filed its business registration on Aug. 29, according to the Virginia State Corporation Commission’s online records.

“I understand people’s feelings about this,” Evans said when asked about the recall campaign. “I don’t think it will get very far, but that’s part of the democratic process too.”

The Mason District representative admits that the name change process could have been handled differently, saying that she wishes it had not taken so long for the board to make its decision and suggesting that the community vote could have been designed to winnow the number of possible new names down from the more than 70 suggestions put on the ballot.

A runoff process where voters narrow down their choices until a single name receives a majority of votes has been used when renaming other FCPS facilities, such as Mason Crest Elementary School in Annandale and Bailey’s Upper Elementary School in Falls Church, according to Evans.

“I think if we could’ve narrowed the number of names down and left it for the community to choose from a smaller number, that would’ve been helpful to the process, but we didn’t, so we had to deal with the input that we did get,” Evans said.

Brabrand took responsibility for how the school system chose to execute the community voting process when he presented to the board on Sept. 28.

As J.E.B. Stuart High School prepares to make a transition to Justice High, Evans hopes that the public can accept the outcome of the name change debate and find ways to come back together as a community.

“We need to remember that the students go there every day with a warm, welcoming, and positive environment,” Evans said. “I hope that we can move forward with the positivity with which this school is known.”