Last Tuesday, a packed School Board meeting saw over a dozen members of the public speak up about John M. Gandy Elementary School, an institution that was once one of the only schools for Black students in Hanover County. A new school building under construction on the current Gandy site that will replace Gandy and consolidate it with Henry Clay Elementary was slated to retain the school name at the project’s inception in 2018.
Back then, board members assured community members that they had no intention of removing Gandy’s name from the replacement school. What has changed since then?
Well, the board became embroiled in a firestorm over its refusal to change the Confederate school names starting in 2019.
And then, that same year, the Ku Klux Klan – a group of domestic terrorists known for lynching Black people throughout the South – hosted a recruitment rally on the county’s courthouse grounds.
In 2020, current Board Chair John Axselle said the quiet part out loud at a meeting of regional school leaders about the lack of racial diversity at Maggie L. Walker Governor’s School, asserting that such schools for gifted students “don’t appeal to everyone, nor do I think we should. …I think it might change our vision, mission or our uniqueness if we try to look like a general public school. We’re not. This is a gifted school.”
His comments came off as elitist, exclusionary and tone deaf. And considering that in Hanover schools Black students are overrepresented in disciplinary actions but underrepresented in advanced and gifted courses, Axselle was in no position to give advice on the subject, anyway.
Another change was the addition of John Redd to the school board. This controversial, self-declared Christian conservative figure publicly railed against the changing of the Confederate school names in 2020, before his appointment by the majority-white, majority-male Board of Supervisors in 2022 to replace a School Board member who had voted to change the Confederate school names.
The biggest change since the board’s 2018 promise to leave the Gandy name intact is that Hanover County’s legacy of systemic racism, pervasive in many of its sectors, including education, has been laid bare for all the world to see. It cannot, it will not, be hidden any longer.