Jefferson Middle School, CT photo (copy)

Work by an ad hoc committee on finding a new name for Jefferson Middle School will pause until this fall.

The effort to consider a new name for Madison’s Jefferson Middle School is on pause until October, following low attendance by members of the ad hoc committee appointed for the effort.

The School Board appointed the committee in March after Jefferson principal Sue Abplanalp made a renaming request to the board Feb. 28. The district received 42 proposals for new names by the April 8 deadline, but the ad hoc committee has yet to discuss any of them other than eliminating a few proposals to honor people who are still alive.

The committee was supposed to have 12 members, but had dropped to nine as of Tuesday’s meeting, according to Barb Osborn, secretary to the Board of Education. Two of those members had yet to turn in their rubric rankings of the remaining proposals for a new name, leaving the committee unable to move to next steps.

Osborn told the seven members in attendance Tuesday evening that she spoke with School Board president Ali Muldrow and district staff members, and recommended the group pause its efforts until an Oct. 18 meeting. The time until then will allow the district to fill the committee again and tweak its rubric, which some members questioned at a meeting last week.

Committee member and Jefferson bilingual resource specialist Soly Rodriguez said she did not like putting the work on pause, but understood it was necessary.

“I want to do it right, I want to be respectful of our community, I want to be respectful of Jefferson,” she said. “It’s the best thing we could do right now.”

Other members expressed similar sentiments. Som said summer was an ideal time for these meetings, but they understood that finding a time that worked for everyone in the fall would be the best option. Committee members voted 7 to 0 in favor of the pause.

Osborn noted that there hadn’t been conversation about the proposals yet. The committee began meeting in early May.

“You’re kind of in a good position right now to be able to conduct a pause so that no one is missing out on conversation that happened around the specific proposals,” Osborn said.

Names to consider

Jefferson Middle School is named for the third president of the United States and original drafter of the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson. Despite writing against slavery and the slave trade, Jefferson owned hundreds of slaves on his plantation and had children with one of them after his wife died.

Options still in under consideration include keeping the school named after Thomas Jefferson or renaming it for Sally Hemings, one of Jefferson’s slaves and the mother of some of his children, or their son Eston Hemings Jefferson.

Some proposed names honor concepts, like Free Speech Middle School and Voting Rights Middle School. Others suggest Wisconsin or Madison pioneers, like Gaylord Nelson, Shirley Abrahamson, Odell Taliafaro and Jeff Erlanger.

If the school is eventually renamed, it would be the fourth school to make such a change since early 2020. 

First, the School Board in January 2020 approved renaming then-Glendale Elementary School for longtime school psychologist Virginia Henderson, who died in 2019. One year later, the board approved renaming Falk Elementary School for Milele Chikasa Anana, the community leader and magazine publisher who died in May 2020, with a community celebration of the new namesake in August 2021.

Most recently, Jefferson’s neighbor, James Madison Memorial High School, was renamed Vel Phillips Memorial High School after the School Board approved a new name last November. Madison was, like Jefferson, a slave owner, which was among the reasons a former Memorial student sought to rename the school.

Osborn stressed that the district is committed to seeing the committee effort through this fall. The board will make the final decision on whether the school will get a new name, and if so, what it will be. The committee will forward a recommendation to the board for consideration in that process.

“This has started and this will continue, I can guarantee that,” Osborn said.

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