Shenandoah County School Naming Dispute Should Be Settled Through Mediation

As I read of the Shenandoah County School Board’s decision to appeal the Federal District Court ruling (Judge  Michael F. Urbanski) ordering the renaming of the schools to “strip the names of the Confederates (Generals Turner Ashby, Robert E. Lee, Thomas ‘Stonewall’ Jackson)” and saying that those school names violated civil rights laws. He also called for the new renaming to take place “immediately”.

The Shenandoah County School Board has decided that local authority over school naming and other issues raised by Judge Urbanski’s decision were beyond his “lawful” authority.  The School Board challenged the legal rationale and the Court’s authority to issue such a ruling.    In essence, the School Board wants to retain the Civil War Confederate heroes’ names on the schools because, in the School Board’s opinion, the names reflected “restoration of public trust”.

Like many other citizens, I am concerned, worried, and embarrassed by the appeal of Judge Urbanski’s ruling. Add to that my own service years ago as a federal district judge’s law clerk, my fifteen years as a lawyer (in the Army, in Connecticut and in many federal courts), and over forty recent years as a mediator, co-founder of the International Association of Mediators and former member of the Board of the Virginia Mediation Network.

Legal counsel for the Plaintiff’s  (the NAACP Virginia and several students) proposal to resolve the issue through mediation (assuming the parties cannot settle the case on their own) is excellent and compassionate for all concerned.

This school-naming case is exactly what the Commonwealth of Virginia and many other states, government agencies, companies, and individuals have decided is the best way to resolve disputes without the expense of money, time, and emotional commitment that is certain to come if litigation through the Courts goes forward.

Charles  P. Lickson, JD, Ph.D.
CMC Senior Mediator/Facilitator
Front Royal, VA

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