“The school on Third Street” — that’s what some parents are calling César Chavez Elementary School after recent reporting revealed the labor activist’s sexual abuse of girls and women.
Now, Long Beach Unified is taking steps to consider renaming it and other campuses with controversial namesakes. School board members on Wednesday directed the superintendent to reconstitute an advisory committee on naming, restarting a stalled process to evaluate current names and suggest new ones. Some parents and administrators say it’s overdue.
During the public comment period at Wednesday’s school board meeting, Li Yun Alvarado, a parent of students at Chavez Elementary, addressed the board with a question: “Should an LBUSD school remain named after a pedophile?”
Alvarado said it was particularly painful to see Long Beach move slowly while other school districts across the state — including Los Angeles Unified — answered that question with a “resounding absolutely not,” and she pressed the school board and district to take swifter action. Survivors of Chavez’s sexual violence “resemble the mamis, tías and abuelas of the majority of the students at our downtown dual-immersion school,” she said, impressing on the board that for some families, the issue is personal.
LBUSD has already taken steps at Chavez Elementary: offering support to the school community and removing murals referencing the disgraced labor leader. Yet board member Juan Benitez, whose downtown district includes the school, recognized it wasn’t enough. He requested that the district and naming committee prioritize addressing Chavez — ideally before next school year, he said.
Chavez Elementary is not the only school whose name students, staff and parents are advocating to change. “We have schools where staff won’t wear the school name on their chest because they don’t support the values of the people that our schools are named after,” said Deputy Superintendent Tiffany Brown.
While there is urgency around changing the name of Chavez Elementary because of recent news coverage, “we have similar sentiment in other parts of our community that haven’t come forward in the same way,” Brown said.
Several years ago, Stanford Middle School teacher Hank Waddles told the school board that 20 of the district’s 72 schools bear the names of problematic figures — including men who enslaved African Americans and led massacres of Indigenous people in California. A third of the district’s students take classes in those 20 buildings, he said.
In years past, Long Beach residents have pushed for name changes to some of these, including Wilson and Jordan high schools. (Advocates have cited Woodrow Wilson’s racism and David Starr Jordan’s acceptance of eugenics.) Yet the advisory committee on naming disbanded in 2015, and aside from the 2016 rechristening of Robert E. Lee Elementary to Olivia Nieto Herrera Elementary and International Elementary to Jenny Oropeza Elementary, little has come from the public pressure for new school names.
That may be starting to shift. Benitez hopes the changes will not be in name only, and he suggested lessons and curriculum on current farmworkers and the contributions of women to their labor movement.
Once the naming committee convenes, it will be able to make suggestions about the current policy on naming as well as propose new names for the board’s approval.