Lake County Gazette

A Christian organization wants the Waukegan Board of Education to table its upcoming April 13 vote that could lead to renaming Thomas Jefferson Middle School after former President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle Obama until an objective criteria has been established.

“Before you rename anything ... before you remove honors and before you establish new honors, you need to establish objective criteria that establish the reasons you are honoring someone and then look at the fullness of someone's record,” said Laurie Higgins, cultural issues writer with the Illinois Family Institute, a traditional Christian organization that is affiliated with the American Family Association. “You can't hyper-focus on one political dimension of their life. You have to look at their life in totality.”

As previously reported, some Waukegan residents want to wipe Thomas Jefferson’s name from the district’s middle school because he owned hundreds of black American slaves. 

“To me it’s absurd to rename anything that's named after Thomas Jefferson because of his importance to the founding of America. There’s never going to be a perfect human to honor because there are no perfect humans," Higgins told the Lake County Gazette.

The name change has been set for a vote due to students and members of the community presenting a petition last summer at the height of protests by Black Lives Matter over the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, according to media reports.

Higgins, however, objects to having district students involved in the process.

“Students in certain school districts are helping to shape policy and, apparently, now they're helping to determine who schools should be named after but that isn't the task of children,” she said. “Even if they are teenagers, they are not mature adults and we're not teaching history properly, so they don't know history.”

Instead, Higgins advocates for a stricter name selection process.

“The overarching principles should be table everything until you've established objective criteria, not just having who is the most enraged show up at school board meetings and yell at you,” she said.

In addition to considering the name Barack and Michelle Obama Middle School, the other two options are John Lewis Middle School and Dolores Huerta and Cesar Chavez Middle School.

“I don’t know why they are considering those two people,” Higgins said in an interview. “Dolores Huerta is a controversial figure who advocated for abortion. She also advocated for the normalization of homosexuality and Cesar Chavez is no friend of immigration. He opposed illegal immigration.”

John Lewis is an African American civil rights icon who worked alongside Dr. Martin Luther King. He died last year.

CBS News reported that Daniel Webster Middle School also will be potentially renamed with one of three historical figures, including desegregationist Edith Smith, NASA mathematician Katherine Johnson and Hispanic astronaut Ellen Ochoa.

The Waukegan Board of Education will officially decide whether to rename the two middle schools at its meeting April 13.

Board president Brandon Ewing told CBS News that if renaming does come to a vote, the board will opt for the first historical figure who receives four votes.

“That means the school board is allowing four people to decide what the new school names will be,” Higgins said.