Naming of North ignites debate

By HAROLD GWIN

VINDICATOR EDUCATION WRITER

YOUNGSTOWN — A city school board member who last month supported a proposal to rename the new North Elementary School after famed Coitsville educator William Holmes McGuffey has changed his mind.

Lock P. Beachum Sr. said he now favors naming the structure the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School, in honor of the slain civil rights leader.

Beachum said he intends to introduce a resolution at Tuesday’s school board meeting calling for the name change.

It may not get any immediate action but could be referred to a board committee for review, he said.

It isn’t the first name Beachum has proposed for the new $8.5 million school now being built on Mariner Avenue.

What happened

It was in May 2006 that Beachum presented a resolution calling for North, which is to be completed by fall 2008, to be renamed Rosa Parks Elementary School in honor of the late civil rights advocate.

The Rev. Michael Write, board president, said at the time the issue should be assigned to a committee for review and recommendation and appointed a special ad hoc committee comprised of Beachum, Jacqueline Taylor and Shelley Murray to handle it.

Beachum said this week the committee never met on the Parks’ resolution.

He said he would have proposed Martin Luther King Jr.’s name at the time, had he known that the current Martin Luther King School in the city was destined to be razed.

The building, on Covington Street on the city’s North Side, is closed now and probably will be torn down next year, school officials said.

“I don’t want to lose that history,” Beachum said, explaining why he wants North to be renamed for King.

The William Holmes McGuffey Historical Society approached the school board on Aug. 14, proposing that North be named after the man known as “America’s Schoolmaster.”

McGuffey, who spent his early years in Coitsville Township, was the author of the famed “Eclectic Readers,” which were the most commonly used reading book in American schools for decades.

McGuffey schools

The society proposed McGuffey Elementary or McGuffey North Elementary as the new name for the school, pointing out that Youngstown has had three McGuffey schools in its history, all gone now.

The last one was razed in 1940, and there was a plan to build a new one in a larger location, but that never happened, said Harry Meshel, former state senator, member of the historical society and a former pupil at that school.

Beachum said at the Aug. 14 meeting he thought the request was “an excellent idea” and he would do what he could to support it.

Other board members asked the society to provide additional background material on its request.

The A. Philip Randolph Institute, a community group named after the black civil rights and labor leader, also lobbied to have the new school named after King at that meeting.

Beachum said this week that there may be other city school buildings that could be named for McGuffey, citing Williamson Elementary as a possibility.

That building was named after local broadcast pioneer and longtime city school board member Warren P. Williamson Jr., founder of WKBN Broadcasting Co.

A new $7.3 million Williamson school was built on Williamson Avenue in 2005.

Write said he will ask school board members to remove Beachum’s resolution from Tuesday’s agenda, however.

It’s premature he said, noting that he now intends to have the board’s Facilities Committee take a look at the school renaming issue, with hopes of getting public participation in the process.

gwin@vindy.com