The Oxnard School District has taken the first step to rename Cesar Chavez School.
The district’s board of trustees voted unanimously March 25 to start the process of picking a new name for the school, which is a pre-kindergarten through eighth-grade campus in Oxnard’s La Colonia neighborhood. It was Juanita School from the 1950s until 1993, when the district renamed it for Chavez, who lived in La Colonia for some of his childhood and later worked in Oxnard as a labor and community organizer.
On March 18, The New York Times published an article in which three women described being molested or raped by Chavez. Two of them were children at the time. The third was Dolores Huerta, who co-founded the United Farm Workers with Chavez in 1966 and remains an influential civil rights leader today at age 95.
Since the article’s publication, states, cities and school districts all over the country have started to distance themselves from Chavez. The California Legislature and the Ventura County Board of Supervisors both changed the name of the March 31 holiday from Cesar Chavez Day to Farmworkers Day. The Oxnard City Council plans to discuss potentially renaming Cesar Chavez Drive at its next meeting, on April 7.
Days after the New York Times story published, the Oxnard School District used a sheet to cover a bust of Chavez that stands on the grounds of Cesar Chavez School. And on March 25, the district board approved a process in which a citizen committee will evaluate possible new names for the school and the board will ultimately decide on a new name.
“We will change the name of this school, and we will do it right,” Trustee Brian Melanephy said.
It should be possible to have a new name in place by the time the 2026-27 school year starts in August, he said.
District will use same process as last renaming
The district has some recent experience with renaming a school. In 2020, it changed the name of the Richard B. Haydock Academy of Arts and Sciences, after a sixth-grader at the school found historical evidence that Haydock, the first mayor of Oxnard, was instrumental in establishing racial segregation in the city and its schools.
Haydock Academy became the Dr. Manual Lopez Academy of Arts and Sciences, named for the city’s first Latino mayor.
The process the district will use to rename Chavez School will be the same one it used to change Haydock Academy to Lopez Academy.
The first step was the March 25 board vote. Next comes a community survey in which respondents will be able to suggest new names for the school. That survey should be open in about two weeks, Superintendent Ana DeGenna told the board.
The district will then create a citizen advisory committee that includes district staff, teachers, students, parents and community leaders. With the Haydock renaming, the committee had about 45 members, DeGenna said.
The committee will review all the potential names submitted in the survey and eliminate the ones that don’t meet the district’s criteria or that lack support on the committee. Committee members will them research the names that remain, consulting with historians and experts, and discuss their findings.
The committee will narrow the names down to a few finalists. DeGenna will recommend one of those to the board of trustees, but the final decision rests with the board.
The “guiding principles” for the new name, DeGenna said, include community-driven decision making; equity, inclusion and representation; community pride; and student empowerment.
How much time and money will it take?
In the Haydock-to-Lopez renaming, the entire process took four or five months, DeGenna said.
If that’s the timeline this time, much of the work would happen over the summer. Ginger Shea, the district’s director of enrichment and specialized programs, said after the board vote that it should be possible to speed the process and have a new name in place by July, if the district chooses to move that fast.
There is a cost associated with changing a school name. In 2020, it cost about $80,000 to change Haydock Academy to Lopez Academy, Shea said. Most of that went toward changing the name on physical objects: the signs on the school building, business cards and stationery, T-shirts and sports uniforms.
The cost could be higher this time, because everything is a bit more expensive than it was six years ago. It also depends on how the district chooses to implement the change, Shea said. In 2020, not everything with the Haydock name was immediately replaced. For example, student P.E. uniforms were replaced gradually.
Should schools be named for people?
The advisory committee will consider all the names submitted through the community survey. But some board members said during the March 25 meeting that they would prefer a name that refers to the Colonia neighborhood or some other cultural or geographic feature of the area, and not one that honors a specific person.
“I don’t want other boards to have to deal with this in the future,” Trustee Monica Madrigal Lopez said. “We can really consider, starting with Chavez, making sure that we don’t name it after an individual if possible.”
Chavez School isn’t the only one in the district with a name that has become controversial. The source of the information about Haydock’s segregationist history was a 2013 academic journal article co-authored by UCLA historian David Garcia. That article stated that Bernice Curren, a school principal and district trustee in Oxnard in the 1930s and 1940s and the namesake of Curren School,, endorsed segregation “in word and deed.”
Evidence in that article also led to the renaming of Blanche Reynolds School in Ventura, which is now Lemon Grove School.
Another school in Oxnard is named for John C. Fremont, one of California’s first United States senators. Fremont was an abolitionist; as a U.S. Army officer during the Civil War, he declared slaves in Missouri to be legally free. That was in 1861, months after war broke out and a year and a half before Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and Lincoln relieved Fremont of his command for insubordination.
But years before that, in the 1840s, Fremont led expeditions in California and Oregon in which his men massacred hundreds of Native Americans.
The current renaming effort will only include Chavez School, but Madrigal Lopez and other board members said they want to set a precedent that will be useful if the district decides to reevaluate other school names.
Murals could be changed, too
The Oxnard School District is also reevaluating other ways in which it honors Chavez, DeGenna told the board.. The bust at Chavez School, now covered by a sheet, might be removed, she said, but the district hasn’t worked out the details.
The UFW actually owns the bust even though it’s on school property, DeGenna said. She told the board she learned that from the artist who created it. The artist is fine with removing the work, DeGenna said, if the district pays to have it moved.
Chavez is also featured in murals at at least two schools in the district. No decision has been made about what to do with those. DeGenna said she plans to “act with caution and make sure we do everything we need to do correctly.”
“I know last week, for many in this community, was a very, very difficult week,” she said. “We are a community that has been grounded in the movement of our farmworkers, and this hit us very hard.”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Oxnard school board begins renaming effort for Cesar Chavez School
Reporting by Tony Biasotti, Ventura County Star / Ventura County Star
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