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Dayton Daily News education reporter Scott Elliott writes about schools, kids, teaching and learning.
Home > Blogs > Get on the Bus > Archives > 2005 > July > 05 > Entry
Schools revisit names, history
By Scott Elliott
Dayton Daily News
DAYTON — It’s been more than 50 years since Wilbur Heflin came to know Nettie Lee Roth, a pioneering educator in Dayton lore but a racist in his memory.
A jovial smile disappeared as he leaned on a cane and rose to his feet at a community meeting Wednesday on what to name the new building being constructed on the site of the old Roth High School. There was an elephant in the room, and Heflin felt something had to be said.
“She was a segregationist,� he said. “This community will not stand for Nettie Lee Roth.�
Heads nodded around the room.
Most public schools are named for people or places hardly anyone disputes — famous presidents, local legends or the neighborhood they’re located in. It’s the less familiar names that make a seemingly simple and pleasant task grow complicated.
With Ohio in the midst of a school construction boom, this may be a once-in-a-generation opportunity to select names that can either inspire or baffle future generations. Dayton is rebuilding nearly all of its schools with the help of a state construction fund and the school board has said it will reconsider their names. Patterson Career Center, named for NCR founder John H. Patterson, is likely next for such a discussion.
Springboro found naming one of its two new schools was easy. The Dennis family sold land to the district at a discount on the condition that the school built there be named for the family, said Superintendent David Baker.
For another new school, on Lytle-Five Points Road, Baker was open to suggestions. Lots of ideas were floated — from John McLean, a local native who became a U.S. Supreme Court justice, to Freedom Elementary School, honoring Springboro’s contribution to the Underground Railroad.
In a final meeting, the handful of voters on hand split between two local figures, and Baker noticed more than a few of the voters were actual relatives of the candidates. To head off a controversy, he stuck with the road name — Five Points Elementary School.
“There was some history there, too,� he said. “There once had been a Five Points school that was a one-room schoolhouse.�
Centerville Superintendent Gary Smiga is crafting a stepby-step approach for considering the names of people for a new school being built on Paragon Road. Finding a name with staying power is a key, he said, so future generations won’t scratch their heads.
That seems to be the case for those attending Colonel White High School in Dayton, which was named after Colonel William Jeremiah White, a former superintendent of Dayton schools who had fought in the Civil War.
With the replacement school for Colonel White being built on the old Roth site, it might seem as though students and alumni of the two schools were headed for a clash about which name took precedence. Not so. Ninth-graders at Colonel White chose Thurgood Marshall, the famous civil rights lawyer and U.S. Supreme Court justice.
Margaret Peters, who wrote a history of Dayton’s black heritage in 1994, recalls Roth without fondness as a racist and has no quarrel with the choice of Marshall instead. But renaming schools still worries her.
“It would be nice if people knew their history,� she said. “There is something being lost.�
Given how Roth is remembered in Dayton’s black community, the choice of Marshall, who helped destroy public school segregation, has a touch of irony. And, Mack argues, the choice of a major black historical figure is simply more appropriate. Although the Dayton school district is more than 75 percent black, it has only one active school named for a black — Dunbar High School.
But what of Nettie Lee Roth’s place in history?
There’s no denying she was a trailblazer. Her 1957 obituary described her as a dedicated educator who graduated from Otterbein College in 1915 and later earned a master’s degree —both rare for women of her day. The story even notes she played basketball and golf in college and was Otterbein’s first woman cheerleader.
Roth became Dayton’s first woman principal when she took the top job at Roosevelt High School in 1948 and in 1956 was named head of athletics for the district, believed at the time to be the first woman to hold such a post in the country.
Roth never married or had children, lived in her family’s Grand Avenue home for most of her life and died of a heart attack after work on a Monday in January at age 62.
To Heflin and Peters, both graduates of Roosevelt, Roth always will be a symbol of the divisions at the school, built with separate swimming pools for blacks and whites. As a top administrator, she was an enforcer of institutional oppression, they said.
“I can understand why a school for predominantly African-American students should not be named for Nettie Lee Roth,� Peters said.
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