A federal judge has ordered Shenandoah County Public Schools to rename two schools for the third time in six years, ruling that the board's 2024 decision to bring back Confederate names discriminated against Black students.
Judge Michael F. Urbanski of the U.S. District Court in Virginia found the board violated the 14th Amendment's equal protection clause and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act, according to the Associated Press. He ordered new names chosen on a racially nondiscriminatory basis "with all deliberate speed."
The two schools sit in Quicksburg. The high school became Mountain View High in 2020, when the board removed Confederate names amid nationwide protests, then reverted to Stonewall Jackson High after a 5-1 board vote in May 2024. The elementary school went from Honey Run back to Ashby-Lee Elementary, a name stitched from Confederate cavalry officer Turner Ashby and Gen. Robert E. Lee. The renames even reached the federal books: NCES data now lists both schools under the restored Confederate names.
The same data shows how few students the fight directly names. Stonewall Jackson High enrolls 496 students, 9 of them Black. Ashby-Lee enrolls 692, 7 of them Black. Districtwide, Black students are 3% of about 5,700 students, matching the figure in the NAACP's suit.
What the judge found
Urbanski's reasoning turned on the difference between leaving an old name alone and deliberately bringing one back. "The Confederate names were restored with complete awareness of their historic legacy and ongoing discriminatory impact," he wrote. "In the court's view, the affirmative act of reinstating these vestiges of segregation is far more problematic than a passive failure to remove a long-standing name or symbol." Schools, he added, are places where children deserve an educational environment free of vestiges of racial discrimination, a different standard than for memorials.
The Virginia NAACP filed the suit in June 2024 on behalf of six students and their parents, represented by the Washington Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights and Urban Affairs. Its president, the Rev. Cozy Bailey, called the ruling a decisive victory. "The school board's 2024 renaming decision is impossible to explain except through the lens of race," he said. Jim Guynn, the county's attorney, didn't immediately respond to the AP's request for comment.
Board members who voted for restoration said they were honoring community sentiment and that the 2020 board had ignored constituents and due process. The reversal came as some Confederate statues removed in 2020 have been restored under President Donald Trump's second administration.
The ruling lands in familiar territory for this beat. Courts have been redrawing the line on race and schools all summer, from the end of Concordia Parish's 60-year desegregation order to the McNair admissions settlement in Jersey City. Shenandoah County now has to produce two new school names, its third set since 2020.
Sources
AP: Federal judge orders Virginia county to replace Confederate school names it restored in 2024
Enrollment and demographic figures from allk12's analysis of National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) data, SY 2024-25.
