The options are pleasant and innocuous: Lakewood Elementary, Horseshoe Lake Elementary, Park Grove Elementary . . . names unlikely to raise any objections, which is a rare commodity in this age of perpetual public outrage.
Those are among the options for new school names in the Woodland district. With schools being reconfigured for the 2019-20 school year, district officials are looking to rename Woodland Primary School and Woodland Intermediate School. Both buildings will convert to K-4 schools, and officials have proposed six pairs of names, inviting the public to weigh in. Voting runs through Friday.
All of which brings up an interesting topic that has nothing to do with Woodland Public Schools — at least not directly. Because as Woodland ponders the option of Westwood Elementary and Eastwood Elementary — sorry, no bonus points for creativity on those — it leads us to ponder why schools and other public facilities are rarely named for people these days.
Actually, we know the reason. No public figure, past or present, is perfect, and the current trend is to focus on human imperfections rather than the greatness of a historical figure. Why, even our beloved state likely would have a different name if it were being founded today; George Washington, after all, owned slaves. King County was renamed — kind of — in 2005, when it came to officially honor the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., instead of William Rufus King, who was U.S. vice president for all of 35 days during the 1800s — and who, by the way, was a slave owner.
Yes, naming things has become more complicated than it used to be. Even the city of Vancouver is finding that out, with a minor controversy over the prospect of naming a new park for Ed and Dollie Lynch, simply because their name is “Lynch.” And naming schools can be particularly problematic.
In Portland, there have been suggestions that Thomas Jefferson High School should be renamed, because the school serves the city’s traditional black neighborhood and, well, Jefferson was a slaveholder. Portland schools are from a different time, with the “newest” public high school being founded in 1956 and all high schools being named for historical figures.
Clark County has largely avoided such controversies by not naming high schools for people. There are, for example, Union and Mountain View and Columbia River and Fort Vancouver, although Vancouver Public Schools does have a Jefferson Middle School. And the Evergreen district’s newest high school is Henrietta Lacks Health and Bioscience High School, which opened in 2013 and led to countless Wikipedia searches for “Henrietta Lacks.”
While some might decry what they see as political correctness run amok regarding the naming of schools or buildings, in truth such names reflect our values as a society. And it is reasonable for values to change over the years.
That is at the crux of ongoing debates in the South about Confederate statues, which might be the only case of losers being celebrated with such righteous indignation. Removing Confederate statues is not an attempt to rewrite history; history doesn’t change, but our views of it and the way we present it can — and should — be altered by time. It is part of being an evolving society.
None of this, as mentioned, has anything to do with Woodland Public Schools and the debate between Riverside Elementary or Riverwood Elementary. But we don’t blame them for taking the safe route in renaming their schools.
