NESPA Winner: Localizing Contest, 2023
The Cypress, Brookline High School, Brookline, MA
Unlikely sources write the latest chapter in Brookline’s reckoning with racial injustice: elementary and middle school students are changing the name of Heath Elementary School, hoping to make a lasting change that will spread throughout their community and trickle down to their classrooms.
The school was named after the Heath family, who were wealthy benefactors to many of the town’s programs nearly two hundred years ago. In October 2022, Heath Principal Asa Sevelius officially announced that Heath Elementary School would change its name.
Public discomfort with the Heath name has grown since May 2018 after research conducted by the School Committee Ad Hoc Task Force on School Names revealed that John Heath, the patriarch of the Heath family, enslaved five people to work on his farms and within his home. The decision to rename the school followed calls from students and faculty to remove references to the name, coupled with a nearly year-long discussion with members of the Heath community.
The Heath Elementary School’s name change marks the town’s second school renaming in the last four years, after the Edward Devotion School became the Florida Ruffin Ridley School, following the discovery that Edward Devotion had enslaved a person. Sevelius said the Florida Ruffin Ridley School’s renaming process offered insight into engaging the town community with the Heath School’s renaming.
“We heeded much advice from Florida Ruffin Ridley’s renaming about being as transparent as possible during the decision-making process and the importance of over-communicating with the community rather than under-communicating,” Sevelius said. “That resulted in sending frequent messages to families and students, videotaping Zoom meetings about our renaming and making those public, putting all necessary information on the website and reminding people about where we were in the process.”
