Renaming Lincoln Elementary Would Mark The First Time AASD Has Removed A Person’s Name From A School To Replace It With Another Person’s Name

In light of the proposal to rename Lincoln Elementary School after Ron Dunlap, I reached out to the Appleton Area School District to find out what the district’s history is in regards to renaming schools.

It appears that this would be the first time that AASD has removed someone’s name from a school in order to replace it with someone else’s name.

The two situations that even approach similarity to the current proposal for Lincoln Elementary are Kaleidoscope Academy and Classical School.

Per the history page of Kaleidoscope Academy, the Kaleidoscope Academy Charter School opened in 2007 and shared space with Roosevelt Middle School. In 2016, Roosevelt Middle School was closed due to declining enrollment and Kaleidoscope Academy expanded to take over the entire building.

According to Classical School’s history page, Classical School was approved by the Board of Education in 1999 and in 2003 AASD renovated a building to house the program. The building that they renovated had originally been named after Ken Sager but was renamed to reflect the occupancy of Classical School.

Per Greg Hartjes, “The District has also seen schools close due to age of the building and with them take the name, such as Washington Elementary, Jackson Elementary, and McKinley Middle school. All three schools were replaced by new buildings, but did not retain the original name.”

So, there are situations such as with Washington, Jackson, and McKinley Middle School where the buildings were closed. [Greg states that they were replaced with new buildings. I can’t speak to the Washington and Jackson Elementary sites, but McKinley Middle School no longer exists and is now the site of Jaycee Park.]

There is also the Roosevelt/Kaleidoscope situation in which Roosevelt Middle School was completely shut down and its building taken over by Kaleidoscope Academy.

There is also the case of Classical School where they took over a building (not another school), and that building was renamed.

There appear to be no cases in which the Appleton Area School District has removed an historical person’s name from a functioning school and replaced it with someone else’s name.