What is the purpose of a public school name?

(re)Naming Schools in Vancouver

A fixable problem that needs simplification and leadership

The views in this article are my own. The parents in our school are not 100% aligned (though according to our recent survey they’re pretty close).

My background is in leadership, product, customer experience, and technology, but outside of work I am the Chair of the Parent Advisory Committee (PAC) at my son’s Elementary school. I am really proud of our school and the parent community surrounding it.

In 2021, I dug way deeper into public school names than I ever expected, learned a lot, and formed some views:

1. Names are more important than I thought
2. About 66 schools in Vancouver need new names (not everyone agrees)
3. The new names should all be location based names (a bunch of people who agree with #2 disagree)

This article lays out why all public schools named after people in Vancouver need to change, how that should happen, and why the best way of naming schools is to use their location.

“What is the purpose of a public school name?”

Answering this question is the most important thing we can do. It is significantly more important than dealing with the history of any individual name.

Currently, Vancouver’s School Board has the wrong answer. The School Board re-naming policy starts with this mistake:

Names selected for District schools are to honour our historical and cultural heritage, recognize outstanding individuals, or be significant to the geography of the area. Names of individuals are only to be used posthumously.

The problem with (all) historical names

If the purpose of a school name is to honour someone, we have to decide who to keep, who to remove, and whom to replace them with. To do this we have to rate individuals against an invisible scale. Instead of naming schools, we argue about colonial history, or which marginalized group/person is better than the rest.

What are school names actually used for?

For most parents the name of their school helps them to know where to take their kid in the morning, where to register, or where to go for the big game.

For the rest of the community it’s to know where to vote, where to go for that practice, or where the floor hockey game is in November.

For day to day users of schools a school name is primarily a functional title (that gains inherent meaning from its community over time). School names just help us to know where to go. We should use them for that, instead of for other things.

That’s not how we name schools

Because of the current policy 60% of our schools are named after white Europeans, 40% are named after something else¹.

Justin McElroy at CBC has done an even deeper breakdown.

This naming convention is unique to Vancouver. It creates all sorts of problems for us that other cities do not have. In Burnaby just one school is named after a person. Most municipalities in BC essentially do not use people names, neither do Canadian cities as far flung as Edmonton and Windsor.

Chart is by Justin McElroy at CBC

If you dig one layer down into Vancouver school names they look like this:

The vast majority of public schools not named after people, are named after their location (neighbourhood or street). This is an established convention that almost always works²

The vast majority of schools not named after people, are named after the street they are on, the community they are in, or similar.

This is the answer to our naming problem.

My child goes to “Kitsilano French Immersion” carries a lot more meaning than my child goes to “Henry Hudson”. Imagine the clarity this would give to conversations about where schools are, which are being considered for closure, where your friend’s kids go to school, and so on and on.

We have established a policy (tradition) that the job of a school name is to honour a person. This is a mistake.

There are a lot of people who deserve to be honoured. Please let’s not use public schools to have those important conversations. Let’s use mountains, or feasts, or statues, or murals, or festivals, or almost anything other than public schools.

The invisible scale: Who goes? Who stays? Who’s next?

The School Board (and District Parent Advisory Committee, and Teachers Union) are talking about doing a historical audit of school names to start the conversation of who goes and who stays. If we decided to stop naming schools after people we could avoid this work entirely.

The School Board realizing how many names need to change

But since this is Vancouver’s approach to naming, let’s see where it takes us.

Who is bad enough to drop?

How do we decide who is bad enough to go?

Is benefitting from a white colonial society bent on genocide/assimilation of indigenous populations globally (British Empire, not Nazis) okay as long as you contributed to education, or saved some lives, whereas; actively killing indigenous people in Canada is worse? Probably, but by how many points?

Does having done things that we now find abhorrent matter less if those things were done on a different continent? No? A little? Three out of five? How does that compare to doing terrible things locally?

What’s the scale?

Etcetera.

Who is good enough to keep?

How good do you have to be to stay? How do we measure good? Does it matter if you are white?

Edith Cavell was once a new good person. Now she has a Vancouver public school, a feast and a mountain named after her (probably a lot more too, she was pretty great). The mountain was formerly named after a racist, but we changed it because Edith is better than a racist (none of this is new).

Is she good enough to keep (yes? maybe? no?). Are there other people who deserve to be honoured who do not have mountains named after them? (Yes).

Does she need a public school in Vancouver named after her? (No.)²

Choosing a new name: Who deserves to have a public school named after them?

If we are sticking with names, once a name is removed we will need a new one and we had better get it right. We have to make sure they have no skeletons in closets because this is the conversation that leads to schools being named after Julie Payette.

A relatively popular idea is that we ought to focus on local people, which brings up the question If (when) we remove Edith’s name to honour someone local, how do we pick that new person?

Who “wins”?

Do you chose the amazing person from the marginalized community who did the incredible thing, or the other amazing person from another marginalized community who did the other amazing thing?

Do we have a rating scale to keep it impartial? Who builds that scale and what does it look like?

Are there scores for marginalization in a given period of history? Do all the ways a person can be marginalized score equally?

Does it matter if lives were saved? What if no lives were directly saved, but lives were improved? How many points per life? Is it in aggregate?

What was the scale again?

Ugh.

We just have a complicated version of this.

There are so many ways we can honour people (mountains, statues, festivals, murals, feasts, etc) school names should not be the vehicle to recognize the many Canadians who deserve recognition.

From the specific, the universal: Why one public school’s name needs to change

Our school is “Lord Roberts Elementary”.

Pretty generic, right? A dead old white guy from the British Empire who you’ve never heard of (or cared about)? Me too.

So why do parents want the name changed²? They have wanted this on and off for years, well before our school started to really think about reconciliation.

It turns out that, while Lord Roberts never came to Canada, he was the first Brit to use concentration camps, you could say he was an innovator. He also did horrible things in India and Afghanistan, but:

Concentration camps

Yuck. Most people do not know this about Lord Roberts, they have never even heard about him. The question then is: does it matter? Most people think it does.

Tents in the Bloemfontein concentration camp. Sadly, we’ve all seen worse looking camps. Hopefully that’s not the point.

As is my job as PAC Chair, I align with, and support, the vast majority of parents who think that:

no school should be named after someone who ran concentration camps

So, let’s change the name. Now what?

The problem is

It is very difficult to change the name of a school because:

• How and who do you even ask? (We emailed Trustees, which was wrong)
• If this name has to go, which others have to also go, where do you stop? (see above)
• The Vancouver School Board has an arcane school “Re-naming” Administrative procedure (AP 541) and are piloting a new one (that is causing delays in the creation of a plan).
• Communities get worked up when name changes are proposed. Then they organize to prevent the change and the Board backs away slowly from the dumpster fire of anger.
• It is difficult (impossible) to agree on a new name (especially who to honour).
• How do we involve First Nations without burdening or tokenising them?

School Board pilot: An evidence based approach

The school board is conducting a pilot (administrative process 541) to test a new re-naming method. Post pilot (soft target January 2022) there will be a review of existing school names.

The Board’s aim is to use “a transparent and evidence-based approach,” and “guide collaborative discussion and impartial decision- making before the renaming of a school or facility is pursued”.

The “evidence based approach” means to assess the “primary legacy” of the historical person (school name) in question. The primary legacy is how the person is generally known historically.

The “primary legacy” approach has been helpful in the pilot because it dispassionately, and transparently, leads the community through an examination of the history. People tend to agree with outcomes they don’t like as long as they are transparent.

This is also seemingly helpful because it breaks the process into: a) deciding to (or not) remove a name, then b)getting a new name.

In the case of the two schools in the current pilot, this worked. It led everyone to generally agree that we should not have a school named after a guy who’s nickname was “The Hanging Judge” (guess who he mostly hung? Hint: think BIPOC).

The School Board needs a tool like this because small, but vocal, groups fight hard to keep their school name. Apparently, this is especially intense when we’re talking about the high school you have a trophy from³.

From the perspective of the people parents yell at (the School Board) this is a win. We will be changing the names of two schools. Communities came along. This almost never happens. Hooray!

This approach means that we had to go through a lengthy, onerous, process to remove the name of someone famous for hanging indigenous people. We are setting up a significant process to allay concerns of a minority of people (in our school 10% or less).

Do we need this process to determine that Lord Roberts, a man who ran concentration camps, is a name that shouldn’t be used?

Do we need it to determine that a man who fought against the emancipation of slaves, Gladstone, shouldn’t have a school named after him?

(etcetera).

Wrong answer to the core question

As long as we are stuck in the current (and pilot) policy, we’re stuck arguing about who is good and who is bad, and who is best and who is better.

If we decided to stop using people, and instead focused on the function of school names we would not need this process.

What about First Nations?

Re-naming schools is part of reconciliation.

Our hard working school trustees and superintendents (that is a sincere statement, they do work hard) are so dedicated to reconciliation that in the AP 541 Pilot they have asked the Musqueam people to gift new school names. Generously, the Musqueam have agreed and are (as of June 2021) researching names for the School Board while also dealing with their many other priorities.

That incredibly well intentioned request posses two big problems for solving the bigger school naming question. Unfortunately, these have the potential to negatively impact reconciliation.

1. Time
   Indigenous naming is a significant gift that takes a lot of time and should not be rushed. It requires elders and others to do research, to go deep, to figure out a truly appropriate gift. Like any great gift it takes time and a lot of hard work from the gift giver. How do you build a rollout schedule against a process like this?
2. Puts the work in the wrong place
   Placing Indigenous naming at the core of a naming process (as in the pilot) places the work of reconciliation on indigenous people instead of white settlers. We’ve named 66 locations after white Europeans, and now, we ask a small indigenous band (who has other bigger more important things to deal with), to take on renaming these schools. That seems misplaced⁴. Not every school in the system needs an indigenous name and there are other ways to include first nations.

More and more people are starting to yell even louder for new names. At some point the school board is going to have to share with these groups that they are waiting for the pilot to complete, and the pilot is waiting for the Musqueam to gift new names. So the reason the pilot won’t be wrapped until January 2020 (ish) is not the the school board, the hold up is the Musqueam.

Ugh.

We should move quickly with a plan, instead of accidentally positioning a small group of first nations (who are doing us a giant favour) as the reason things take so long.

And…

Indigenous names, not double names

We should remember that giving a school an indigenous name does not always work out as intended.

In 2016 the School Board named Vancouver’s newest School “Crosstown” after the neighbourhood it’s in. While this was a step forward the re-naming ran into a ton of trouble.

The Teacher’s Union pushed for a name that “reflects Aboriginal cultural history”, as did the District Parent Advisory Council (DPAC). Others pushed for the school to be named Alexander Won Cumyow elementary school after a Chinese-Canadian activist. Those wanting a to honour Mr. Cumyow “lost”, those wanting an indigenous name “won”, sort of.

The school now has two names Crosstown and šxʷwəq̓ʷəθət⁵.

Giving a school two names doesn’t work. This is in large part because non-indigenous people are never going to learn to say, read, or use šxʷwəq̓ʷəθət as long as they have an English option. So now we’ve created a situation where a meaningful indigenous name will be in large part ignored.

It is doubtful that this was the intent, but this feels like tokenism.

There is an argument to be made that the well-meaning people at the Teachers Union and DPAC accidentally helped to create a two tier naming system where indigenous names, like so many indigenous people, are a tier below the white/English name, but this article isn’t about that.

You see the (other) problem?

As long as the perceived purpose of a public school name is to honour someone, or as long as we require a local band to engage on each name, we have this problem. These issues can’t go away because even as we agree to get rid of people who ran concentration camps, we have no path to new names.

We end up arguing about who is the most virtuous.

This will happen over and over again, and for every winner there will be multiple losers.

A path forward

We (the School Board supported by parents and others in the community) could state outright that:

1. We want schools named after their location (not to honour people or places).
2. Schools named after people will be changed over a period of years.
3. Where desired (and over a much longer period of time) communities, PACs, and the School Board can work with appropriate first nations to gain the gift of an indigenous name.

What is the purpose of a public school name?

A public school name should simply make the location of instruction as clear as possible to existing and future people who use it.

Lord Roberts has come to mean more than the villain it is named after. This comes from a community of teachers, parents, students, and staff. We should not use the goodwill that school communities create to honour others. We should let that goodwill honour those who created it.

What we need to get there, to unlock the power and connection inherent in local school communities, is leadership.

A note about people

In this process I have had the opportunity to connect with School Trustees, parents, people at the School Board, tweet with the Musqueam, and more. These are all really good people working hard to try to get this right. We’re not there yet, but on all sides the intent is positive.

Thank you for reading! If this helped you gain some perspective please leave a comment, feedback, or idea add it below, shoot me an email, or send me a tweet.

I also wrote this piece about how to get comfortable with conflict that you might like.

Ian.

¹This is slightly more complicated as some streets are named after other Britons and Vancouver generally has a naming problem, but it’s pretty close. Also Crosstown is apparently a neighbourhood I didn’t know about, so that falls into the Location based name set.

² At the time of writing 81 parents in a school with about 600 students have answered the naming question (we added it late and missed the first 45 respondents). While I am not sure the exact parent population of the school we consider this statistically representative (for our school). About 10% of respondents to our 2020/21 parent survey feel that the name and history do not matter (another way of looking at this is 90% of people think the name should change). The 10% are (generally) proud of the school (me too!), feel we should not mask history (agree), kids don’t know (true), parents don’t know (also true), there are other things to focus on (amen), so, it doesn’t matter

³According to David Nelson Deputy Superintendent of Facilities (who seems to be a super smart, friendly, capable guy) who lives in a world of stakeholder meetings and committees, and has been through all this for a lot longer than me

⁴Unintentionally this is a version of “Hi local bands, can you please take on the significant task of renaming our schools because we named them after the most important people in the system that took your unceeded territories?”

This is like when people from marginalised communities are asked by white interviewers how to fix the problem.

“So,” says white interviewer to BIPOC and/or LGBTQ2+, “How do we stop racism/hate crime/etc?”

BIPOC and/or LGBTQ2+ interviewee facepalms.

⁵A mode of transportation used by Musqueam people whereby they caught the tide as a shortcut from False Creek to Burrard Inlet