by Amelia Aycock
Vance County Schools Correspondent
Finally, after months of deliberation and a decision to table the issue at last month’s school board meeting, the naming of the new elementary school has been decided.
The vote taken on Monday at the Vance County Board of Education meeting was a respectable 5-2, with only members Robert Duke and Ruth Hartness disagreeing on, as board member Gloria Ellis put it, “Clarke with an ‘e’ Elementary”.
Presentations from the public were made in defense of Charlotte Hawkins Brown Elementary, and the historical reasoning was sound, but in the end, the decision came down to what the students and teachers of the old Clark Street School had requested.
“We owe it to the students to give them ownership of the name. It’s their school. When Dabney got it’s new school, it was ‘Dabney’. When Aycock did, it was ‘Aycock’,” said Cobb.
Ellis, who claimed to have had conversations with many of the students and teachers at Clark Street, asserted that this was what they wanted and ultimately, it’s what they ended up with.