Editorial

If the City of Falls Church's School Board sticks with the plan of limiting its options for naming the new middle school to the six final choices of its School Naming Committee, as reported in last week’s News-Press, we know which one we'd prefer. Few persons stand as a better role model for the kind of responsible and compassionate adults we hope the youth in ours or any community will become than one of the final six proposed names: Eleanor Roosevelt.

The other finalists are Nellie Henderson, Dolley Madison, Anne Mason, George Mason and Tripps Run.

What’s in a name, you say? We say a lot. Young students attribute a lot to the name of their nurturing institutions, and the very name of a school can be an important “teachable moment.”

Many, many a school report will be written on whomever or whatever a school is named after. This is why the name of an exemplary person is always preferable for a school to a geographic place, for example.

So, in the case of the six choices before the School Board, we can readily eliminate two. Tripps Run, while representing a natural feature of Falls Church that students should rightly help to preserve, is, after all, merely a creek. The name is far beneath the import of a public institution of learning and could make a mockery of it by virtue of its triviality. George Mason is redundant. As exemplary a person as this Founding Father of our nation was, our local high school, and a nearby university, are already named after him. It’s a wasted opportunity to be so uncreative.

That leaves us with four names, all women. As for Anne Mason, wife of George Mason, and Dolley Madison, they are held up as exemplary for being, with all due respect, veritable doormats by modern standards. Anne Mason was stuck at home to raise 11 kids, and Dolley Madison is known best for serving ice cream at the White House. Hardly what today's young women need to emulate in order to use their education for a positive impact on today's world.

Especially, that is, by contrast to Nellie Henderson and Eleanor Roosevelt. Ms. Henderson taught at the first school for African Americans in Falls Church and spearheaded construction of the James Lee School for African American students. Naming the new school for her might be good penance for Falls Church’s less than exemplary history with regard to civil rights, at least until 1961 when it lagged two years behind neighboring jurisdictions in permitting integration of its schools.

Still, we remain struck by the prospects of a school named for Eleanor Roosevelt, the nation's first truly stand-alone and heroic First Lady, for her compassion and forceful leadership on behalf of black Americans, the poor and women at home and abroad. We could not be prouder of our community were it to hold up to all its young people such a grand and noble model.