ST. LOUIS — Seven years after community outcry over an elementary school named for a Confederate lieutenant, the school has been renamed for a local Black educator.
The former Kennard Elementary School, at 5031 Potomac Street in the , is now the Betty Wheeler Classical Junior Academy elementary, honoring , the top-rated public high school in the state.
Wheeler, who died in 2011, was the daughter of T.D. McNeal, Missouri’s first Black state senator. She graduated from Sumner High School and was one of the few Black students attending ºüÀêÊÓƵ University in the 1950s. She started her teaching career at Gundlach and Yeatman elementary schools before opening Metro in 1972.
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Wheeler’s surviving family members approved the elementary school’s name change, one of several suggestions first pushed by parents, alumni and community members in 2015.
The gifted magnet school was given the temporary name of Classical Junior Academy in 2020 to drop recognition of Samuel Kennard, a lieutenant in the Confederate Army and local businessman. After the Civil War, Kennard operated a carpet company on Washington Avenue, lived in a Portland Place mansion and was the first president of the whites-only Veiled Prophet civic organization. He died in 1916.
The move to drop Kennard’s name from the school, , was part of a local and national reckoning with streets, statues and buildings named for slaveowners and other racist historical figures, most recently in 2020 when a statue of Christopher Columbus was removed from Tower Grove Park.
In a defense of their great-grandfather after the removal of his name from the school, J. Kennard Streett and Donald Streett of ºüÀêÊÓƵ County wrote that Kennard joined the Confederacy “as a teenager along with 750,000 others.†They added that Kennard was a major donor to then-Barnes Hospital, St. Vincent de Paul Society and other charities and was a lead promoter of the World’s Fair in 1904.
Parents and alumni wanted to change the school’s name “to better reflect their pride in being part of the diverse and inclusive school that exists today,†according to a press release Wednesday from ºüÀêÊÓƵ Public Schools.
Kennard school opened as a neighborhood elementary school in 1930, was once a Junior Naval ROTC middle school and became a gifted magnet school in 1990. It is now one of only two majority-white schools in the district, along with Mallinckrodt Elementary. Both require high scores on intelligence tests for admission.
Overall, SLPS is about 80% Black and 12% white. At Wheeler, 30% of students are Black and 60% are white. In the last dozen years, the school’s demographics flipped after court-mandated desegregation rules expired that reserved at least 55% of magnet school spots for Black students.
The school’s test scores are among the highest in the state, with 80% of students testing proficient or advanced in math and English.