School name should reflect community

To the editor: I read with interest your front-page article in a recent paper, “Middle school to be named Cedar Grove.”

I first want to say thank you to Scott Milligan and Shirley Babson for their commitment to all of the people in the Lockwood Folly community who will have children and grandchildren attending the soon-to-be-new middle school.

Too bad Mr. Hobbs was not as committed to his original thoughts on naming the school.

“The school name should reflect the community in which it serves,” he said, when he asked for it to be named Lockwood Folly Middle School. Now he says:

“One thing that struck me was the community involvement, the sense of community pride that Cedar Grove has for their community. As I thought about it, I thought this maybe should be a model for the school; that it can be a time of healing and a time of working together for the good of all of our children.”

Have you noticed, Mr. Hobbs, how proud the people of Varnamtown are of their town and how involved they are in not just their town, but in the whole community surrounding them? I have known of many times when they reached out to anyone in the area who was in need.

They were not there to demand the new school be named Varnamtown Middle School.

They were there, along with others from the area, in support of naming the school for all of our children who live in Lockwood Folly Township—all the children who live in Varnamtown, Stanbury, Holden Beach, Boones Neck, Silver Hill, Mount Pisgah, Oak Grove, Civietown and Cedar Grove and all of the subdivisions—Lockwood Folly (named for Lockwood Folly Township), Old Ferry Estates, Bacons Bluff, Tanglewood, Brooks Beach, Fisherman’s Village, Holiday Acres, Barefoot Bay, Coastal Retreat, Sand Castles and all the others in the area that will have children attending this school.

In the past, there were more one-room schoolhouses in this area than Cedar Grove. There was Hog Bay over on Mount Pisgah Road. I personally would not support naming a school Hog Bay.

Then there was Secession school over in the Boones Neck area. I asked my daddy where they got that name. He said he didn’t know, probably from the voting precinct in our area called Secession, but Secession is just not a good name for a school, either.

Cedar Grove is not a bad name, but why can’t we all pull together as one community and not just a “black community” as Mr. Hewett referred to Cedar Grove?

I’m sure there must be whites and maybe other races living in Cedar Grove, as they are most anywhere now. So let’s all pull together no matter what the name of our school and live together in harmony.