Wheeler name change town hall

Submitted information from Zoe Shepard of the Wheeler Name Change Initiative:

“We will be having our second virtual town hall on Monday October 11 at 6:00pm where we will be recounting our initiative, giving updates, and opening the floor to questions.

“We are continuing to reach out to the board and attend board meetings, though we are still unable to elicit a response. Over the summer, we attended the June board meeting then launched an email campaign sending emails three times a week throughout the month of July.”

More specifically:

“Each board member received 22 emails from students within the initiative, but majority of the Board failed to respond even once.

“If the Board cannot adequately address the concerns of the community, they cannot properly represent said community. The sole obligation of the Board members is being willfully neglected, and we deserve better.”

There are two ways to sign up to watch the town hall: GoTo Webinar and Linktree.

Previous ECN coverage can be found here.

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Wheeler High School students and others who are organizing to change the school name are having a virtual town hall meeting next week.

The Facebook group Joseph Wheeler Name Change said the town hall will take place next Tuesday, Feb. 23, starting at 8 p.m.

Students, parents, staff and the school community are invited to attend, and can register by clicking here.

The group was formed after a petition was created last summer to change the name of Wheeler. The school, which opened in 1965, was named after Joseph Wheeler, a Confederate Civil War general.

Students have been speaking during the public comment period before the Cobb Board of Education in recent months (see video clip below), but said school board leadership has not responded to their requests to meet, or to have the issue placed on meeting agendas for discussion.

School board member Charisse Davis of Post 6, which includes the Wheeler cluster, signed that online petition.

In December, the board’s four-member Republican majority voted along partisan lines to require a majority vote for members other than the chair to add agenda items.

“We fully value the time and work they put into serving the community but that does not mean we aren’t willing to hold them accountable in instances such as this,” the group said in a recent post.

“Not only do we want the board to hear what we have to say, we truly want to hear what they have to say as well. Ignorance is NOT the answer to building a better community nor a better Cobb.”

The group has said having the school named after Wheeler “does not reflect the values of our students today.”

They’ve said their research shows that the Cobb school board named the then-new high school on Holt Road at a time when the school district was beginning racial integration.

During its early years, Wheeler was a nearly all-white school, but as the area began to diversify, it’s become a majority-minority school.

According to the Georgia Department of Education, Wheeler had an enrollment of 2,038 students in October, with 861 black students, 478 Hispanic students and 308 students of Asian descent.

The Joseph Wheeler Name Change group, which said last fall it wanted to spark a “community dialogue” about the issue, said next week’s town hall will be open to anyone regardless of their point of view, and that the event was designed to have a “constructive conversation.”

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