Daniel Boone Elementary School is scrapping its frontiersman namesake, opting to replace the name after nearly a hundred years of operating.
The school renaming process is underway after Chicago Public Schools’ Office of Equity ruled that Daniel Boone was a “historically egregious figure” —part of a districtwide initiative to replace mascots tied to slavery, racism, and misogyny, as reported by the Chicago Tribune.
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Community members, alongside students and parents, will be a part of the renaming process, with a community event set for Thursday to allow the public to provide name input and vote on top choices. From there, the renaming process will move to a bracket-style voting process to select the name, according to a school newsletter from Friday.
Last Wednesday, the school in Chicago’s West Ridge community hosted an in-person forum for the renaming process that was exclusively for parents, guardians, staff, and community members who are “Black, Indigenous, [or] People of Color.” The forum for minority input was required as part of the district’s renaming process.
The school’s namesake, Daniel Boone, was an American frontiersman and pioneer in the 1700s who led expeditions through the Appalachian Mountains of Virginia, Tennessee, and Kentucky, according to History.com. Boone owned as many as seven slaves at one point in his life.
The district’s Equity Office said that a name change was supported due to Boone’s “relationship with native/Indigenous colonization and dehumanization as well as being a slave owner of African American people,” the outlet reported.
Several people with ties to the school have supported the name change, hinting that it was overdue.
“When I was a principal there, we tried for a little while to find some kind of authentic fit between who Daniel Boone was and what he represented and the life experiences of over 1,100 first- and second-generation immigrant kids from over 40 language communities,” said Paul Zavitkovsky, principal of the school from 1991 to 2001, to the outlet. “It was just too big a stretch.”
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Any change of the name will not be immediate. The school district said any new school name would be voted on by the Board of Education for approval before March 2023, in addition to other processes in place, according to the outlet.
