In a long-awaited decision, a federal judge ruled Thursday in favor of the students who, along with the NAACP, sued Shenandoah County’s school board over its renaming of schools after Confederates. WMRA’s Bridget Manley reports.
Federal Judge Michael Urbanski said in his ruling that, “the evidence establishes that the school board’s decision to reinstate the Confederate school names violated the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment, Title VI, and the Equal Educational Opportunities Act.”
The court case has been ongoing since the summer of 2024, when several Shenandoah County students and the Virginia Chapter of the NAACP sued the Shenandoah County School Board over its controversial decision to reverse the names of two schools originally named for Confederates, which had been changed in 2020.
The names of Mountain View High School and Honey Run Elementary School were reverted to Stonewall Jackson High School and Ashby-Lee Elementary School.
Urbanski said that the case was unique for two reasons. First, the students were not suing to change names that had been continually in place for years, but rather they sued for the 2024 school board’s abrupt reversal of its own decision four years earlier, in which the board's previous members admitted the names were racially discriminatory.
Second, Urbanski noted that the 2024 school board members declined to respond to discovery about their reasons for reinstating the Confederate names and invoked their legislative privilege. They refused to provide testimony, documents, or other related materials about their motives to the plaintiffs.
This was a clear sticking point for Urbanski throughout the trial. Urbanski reminded Jim Guynn, the school board's attorney, during the trial that he could not use the school board's thoughts or feelings in the case because they had invoked their legislative privilege.
Urbanski wrote that the testimony provided by the students, who talked about how they felt when the names were reversed, as well as the expert testimony that presented the history of slavery, segregation, Confederate commemoration, and integration in Virginia, was “credible and compelling, meeting their burden of proof on all elements of the legal claims alleged.”
Further, Urbanski said that the school board’s evidence was “neither fully credible nor persuasive on the issues of discriminatory impact and intent.”
As Urbanski concluded, he wrote that “at the same time, the court is mindful of aspects of this dispute that transcend the legal issues, including the historical, cultural, and political overtones that continue to divide the Shenandoah County community.”
Urbanski said that the names are not on memorials – but rather, they are school names, and “school names are different.” He quoted the landmark case Brown v. the Board of Education, which found that school segregation was unconstitutional, and “education is the very foundation of good citizenship.”
Urbanski then closed by writing, “Following Brown I these many years later, this memorandum opinion recognizes the primacy of providing an equal opportunity for all children to “awaken,” “prepar[e]”, and “adjust” in an educational environment free of vestiges of racial discrimination.”
