Albemarle schools seek input on renaming Murray Elementary

Albemarle County Schools are seeking input on ten possible names for Virginia L. Murray Elementary School in Ivy, which is named after a pioneer in Black education in the community. In 2018, the school system adopted a policy to review all buildings named after people. Last year, what had been Cale Elementary on Avon Street Extended became Mountain View Elementary last July. 

92 percent of respondents to an online survey posted in January said they would prefer to keep the V.L. Murray name and four people spoke at a February 10 meeting in favor of that outcome and none spoke for another. However, the policy requires the naming committee to submit ten names for the School Board’s consideration, so another survey has been sent around. A final  survey asks people to choose three possible suggestions. The committee will hold a final open meeting on this issue on March 24. (survey)

Last month, the Albemarle Historic Preservation Committee discussed potential historic markers to commemorate Black and Women’s history in the county.  One of three proposals would recognize Murray. 


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