Long Beach Unified has removed all public references to César Chavez at the elementary school named for him, after pressure from parents and school board members to rename the campus following revelations that the labor activist had sexually abused girls and women.
The district recently took down the front entrance sign, and the board of education is expected to reconstitute an advisory committee on renaming this summer, according to Elvia Cano, a spokesperson for the district. The committee, district and members of the Chavez community will then work together to recommend a new school name, Cano said in a statement.
LBUSD has already taken action, removing murals depicting Chavez from the surfaces around the school in March. In April, a parent addressed the school board, urging the district to move faster in its renaming process, as other districts have done after news about Chavez broke, she said.
Chavez will not be the only school up for renaming. Hoover Middle School, which will reopen in 2027 as the dedicated site for the district’s dual immersion middle school program, will receive a new name that better reflects the bilingual program, Cano said.
Other sites may be considered as well. For more than a decade, residents have urged LBUSD to rename a number of its schools, including high schools named for Woodrow Wilson and David Starr Jordan, who critics say held racist and eugenicist views.
Previously, the naming committee and district took action in 2016 to rename Robert E. Lee Elementary as Olivia Nieto Herrera Elementary and International Elementary as Jenny Oropeza Elementary. Yet district administrators have acknowledged that some LBUSD staff members continue to feel uncomfortable wearing certain school names on their chests because of who those schools are named for. Stanford Middle School teacher Hank Waddles previously told the school board that more than a quarter of the district’s 72 schools are named for problematic people.
School board member Juan Benitez, whose district includes Chavez Elementary, requested in April that its renaming be prioritized. “I feel an obligation and a sense of urgency and responsibility, quite frankly, to the members of the community of that school,” he said.