Biloxi school named after Confederate president is changing. Here are the 5 options.
The Biloxi School Board received five potential new names for Jefferson Davis Elementary School on Tuesday night. None of them honor a person, reflecting concerns that any such name could become controversial now or in the future.
The proposed names are Back Bay, Biloxi Bay, South Bay, Bay Breeze and West Biloxi.
In November, the board will choose one of the names to replace the one honoring the president of the Confederacy. The change follows renewed pressure to remove symbols of the Confederacy from public places, a push that has brought down dozens of monuments and led to new names for buildings across the South.
But Superintendent Marcus Boudreaux said that national trend had not played much of a role in Biloxi’s decision.
Boudreaux told the Sun Herald he started the conversation around renaming the school in February with Principal Lona Poole.
“No one has really complained,” Boudreaux said. “People have given suggestions. The big suggestion we were getting from parents was how much they loved the school, the staff, the values of the school, but they felt like the name didn’t share those values.
In July, the school board unanimously accepted Boudreaux’s proposal to rename the school. In September, the district began accepted ideas for new names from community members.
The finalists were selected by a 12-person committee that reviewed 62 submissions and voted on their top five choices at a meeting on Oct. 15, Boudreaux said at the school board meeting. The committee included Jeff Davis Elementary parents and administrators, staff from across the district, and a representative from Keesler Air Force Base.
Confederate monuments have drawn tense protests in south Mississippi, but there has been little in the way of backlash to Biloxi’s decision to rename the school. The board’s July decision to seek a new name went unreported at the time, and when the district issued a public statement about the plans last month, there was not much public outcry.
Even in the Facebook groups for alumni who attended the school in the 1960s to 1970s, disappointment at the decision quickly gave way to brainstorming new candidates for the school’s name.
“Any time you have something and you know something by that name, it’s familiar to you,” said Brenda Pugh, who attended the school in the 1970s. “So that’s where we went to school. If you change the name then that’s not really where we went to school.”
But Pugh was happy to propose a new name: Glendon Johnson Elementary, honoring the principal she remembered fondly from her time at the school.
On Tuesday, Johnson’s name was not among the finalists. The chosen five represent aspects of the school’s geography.
Boudreaux told the Sun Herald he was concerned that choosing a name to honor any person, living or dead, would draw criticism.
“I would like us to get out of the business of naming schools after individuals,” he said. “I would like to find something that is unique and significant to Biloxi, and that will ring true forever, and you never have to worry about coming back and revisiting this. You’re never gonna please everyone, when you name it after an individual.”
The school has carried the name Jefferson Davis since it opened in the early 1960s. At the time, schools all over the South were being named or renamed for Confederate leaders in order to demonstrate regional resistance to integration and the Civil Rights Movement.
