Reply to Tired of Name Changes/Bad Planning

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Reply to "Tired of Name Changes/Bad Planning - Vote NO on School Bonds"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]This name change movement only started in 2015. Are you suggesting people were really venerating Confederate figures in 2010 or 1998? The fact is that people associated the school names more with the surrounding community and the schools' traditions than with the namesakes.[/quote]

Giving a school a Confederate general's namesake, and continuing to refer to the school by that namesake, necessarily venerates the figure. That's why we name places after people: to commemorate them.

Anyway, who cares why it took so long? Why does it bear on whether it's proper to name public places after traitors? To the extent it matters at all, my guess is that the issue finally came to a head in 2015 because it took that long for there to be a critical mass of political will. Is it really any surprise that proponents of the name change expected heavy headwinds and waited until they saw any hope of success? I mean, look at all of the people who came out of the woodwork to fight for keeping the school named after a traitor.

Let me also put it this way: if the county builds a new school, would you propose naming it after a Confederate general? Of course you wouldn't, because it's not okay to name public places after traitors anymore, and there is a long list of people far more deserving of veneration. So let's not let status quo bias and knee-jerk reaction to change cloud the issue.

[quote=Anonymous]But, either way, I'd be less concerned with the SJW fixation on school names if the School Board could demonstrate that it was otherwise exercising prudent management of FCPS's resources - i.e., looking to use to available capacity at schools like Lee and Mount Vernon, accelerating the overdue renovation at Falls Church, and moving promptly to build a new high school in western Fairfax that might discourage the continued flight of higher income families to Loudoun. But instead we get lectures on how painful names like "Stuart" are to a handful of people from the likes of Ryan McElveen, along with capital spending projects that are arbitrary and will only aggravate existing disparities between schools (West Potomac vs. Mount Vernon, Madison vs. Marshall, etc.)

Vote NO if you want to send a strong message that FCPS needs to go back to the drawing board and come up with something better.[/quote]

It feels an awful lot like the the tail is wagging the dog here. There are certainly legitimate criticisms of how the board is dealing with issues of capacity, facilities, and competing for families that might otherwise move to Loudoun. But that's why we have candidate elections and a community engagement process. Rejecting all of those in order to launch a nuclear option of denying the board hundreds of millions of dollars in funding seems... extreme. As though you're raging about the Stuart issue and trying to justify the voter's equivalent of a primal scream by citing other issues that would be worked out through the political process in the usual course. Remember too that the vast, vast majority of the school board's time is spent on stuff other than renaming Stuart, despite what the outsized coverage of the issue might suggest.[/quote]

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