Lee High School will be LEE High School

North East Independent School District trustees decided the new name of Robert E. Lee High School by a 5-2 vote Monday. Effective next school year, the school will be know as Legacy of Educational Excellence High School, or LEE High School. That’s right, “Lee” was too controversial for the board, so they changed it to “LEE”.

The Board of Trustees was bamboozled by hyper-emotion in a national tidal wave of revisionist history. Their choice to remove the name and then to keep the “LEE” name shows that renaming the school was a merely political move.

Lee High School officials claimed the change was made because of “threats” and “outrage” from the community, and the burden of continuous education on why the school was named after the Confederate general, which essentially means the school complained about the need to teach history. Is this laziness or pure progressive politics?

Their selection of the name “LEE High School” has wedged the School Board between a rock and a hard place. Not only will it now take more time to explain that the name is LEE High, not Lee High, they will also have to teach the history behind the name regardless of the change.

Perhaps the Board now wishes they had stuck with the 2015 Board of Trustee’s decision to preserve the original name of the school, and ask the teaching staff to teach history accurately, and have the history of Robert E. Lee’s life posted on the school’s website for all to reference and learn.

Because the NEISD Board had already made the decision to remove Robert E Lee’s name, SAFA contributed the rationale behind the name “LEE” to help tax payers and parents save money. A SAFA member submitted the suggestion to use “LEE” as an acronym to save the cost of new signs and equipment, like the band trailer. The decision to use an acronym rather than an entirely new name does help the Board look like they stand with parents instead of violating parental trust. It also placates Lee Alumni, an important consideration as their fundraising prevented the name change in the past.

The old Lee name is the new LEE name and in the end nothing really changed, except the cost to school loyalty and to tax payers.

Schools are named after impactful people, not perfect people. What precedent has the NEISD set for themselves in the selection of a name for the next new high school?