Plan to drop James Monroe’s name from Santa Rosa elementary school postponed

The Santa Rosa City School Board voted late Wednesday not to immediately drop the name James Monroe from a Marlow Road elementary school campus, but agreed to create a community committee to study renaming the school.

Board trustee Omar Medina had proposed eliminating the name of the nation’s fifth president, a slaveholder, and renaming the northwest Santa Rosa school for George Ortiz, a civil rights leader and patron of local Latino empowerment. Ortiz died in January at the age of 85.

Medina urged the board to move immediately on his proposal to fast-track existing board policies on renaming schools, citing the racial reckoning in the wake of the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer in May and a subsequent national push to remove the names of Confederate leaders, slave holders and supporters of white supremacy from civic buildings and public spaces.

His proposal to make an advisory committee optional rather than mandatory fit with past practices by district officials, Medina argued, citing the May 2019 decision to name a boardroom at the district office after former trustees Frank Pugh and Bill Carle without any input from a community group.

Medina, who said he has been in consultation for months with community leaders about honoring Ortiz, expressed concern that current board policy directs an advisory committee to develop “a list of names for the Board’s consideration and provide background on the names recommended.” Medina proposed that Ortiz be the only person considered.

“My ask is specifically around renaming the school (for) George Ortiz,” he said. “I’m not asking for recommendations.”

Current board policy requires Superintendent Diann Kitamura to create a advisory committee to advise the board on changing a school’s name. Its membership must include, among others, at least one member of a local historical group, one parent, one member of a bargaining unit, one employee from a non-represented group, a member of an English language learner advisory group. At least half of the committee must be made up of members of the community or business groups that reflect “the diversity of the students in the school district.”

Monroe’s dominant Latino population is among Medina’s reasons for selecting the school to honor Ortiz, the son of migrant farmworkers who became a social worker and founded California Human Development, an anti-poverty agency that became one of the largest nonprofits in Sonoma County. Ninety-three percent of the school’s nearly 400 kindergarten through sixth-graders are Latino, the highest percentage among Santa Rosa City Schools campuses.

But there was significant public and board pushback — not necessarily for renaming a school for Ortiz, but for the timing and pace of the proposals.

“I’m all for honoring George Ortiz. I am not a fan of slaveholding dead presidents,” trustee Ed Sheffield said. “I think we need to at least signal, in the spirit of the times that we are living in, the zeitgeist, make some kind of commitment that we are going to make these kind of changes.”

But the way the proposal came to the board was out of sync with how such changes should be considered, board members said.

“We put the cart before the horse,” Sheffield said.

Monroe fourth-grade teacher Chris Bertozzi was among a slew of public speakers who said student and staff involvement is crucial to any name change discussion.

“If a name change is needed, you need to include the community in the process,” she said. “If you make a top down decision then this change is happening to us and it is seen as punitive, versus if you make a change with us it can been seen as restorative.”

In response to criticism that both the policy change and the proposal to swap Ortiz for Monroe fell on the same agenda, Medina pointed to months of agendized and postponed items related to his request to change district rules on how facilities are named.

“January 15 is when I started this process, so it’s not like, you know, I just brought it on,“ he said. ”It’s here today but the process has been requested since awhile ago.“

Board members voted to change the word “citizen” to “community” in the advisory board description but unanimously rejected the proposal to make an advisory committee optional, saying it flew in the face of the district’s push for more community engagement, not less.

Saying the creation of an advisory committee to study name changes falls under her purview, Kitamura vowed to consult on the creation of study groups with principals at both James Monroe and Luther Burbank schools. Trustee Alegria De La Cruz on July 8 suggested changing the name of Luther Burbank to Dolores Huerta Elementary.

Kitamura will provide the board with an update at its Aug. 12 meeting.

A task likely to fall to the as-yet-created committee is getting to the bottom of the true origins of the school’s namesake. While the school now bears the name of the fifth American president, the name “James” was added to Monroe Elementary school more than a quarter-century ago by a board trustee who also pushed successfully to add “Abraham” to Lincoln Elementary and “John C.” to Fremont Elementary. There is no indication that President Monroe had anything to do with the school beyond that bureaucratic move, according to local historians. The Monroe District was annexed to Santa Rosa City Schools in 1950.

You can reach Staff Writer Kerry Benefield at 707-526-8671 or kerry.benefield@pressdemocrat.com. On Twitter @benefield.