Letters to the Editor

LIKELY UNPOPULAR, BUT IT’S TIME

My name is David Clem and I graduated from Robert E. Lee High School in 1967. The school provided me with an excellent public school education and I have a much stronger appreciation of this as a parent and grandparent.

I was fortunate to continue my education at Dartmouth College and Massachusetts Institute of Technology, but I remain close to a large number of my high school classmates. In fact, I have much stronger ties to my high school experience than college or graduate school, but it has little to do with the name of the school. The relationships I developed with my fellow students and the quality of the teachers at Lee were the two most important ingredients for my high school experience.

I know that support for public schools in Tyler has changed considerably since I graduated. The demographics of the Lee student population have changed dramatically, and it is not too hard to understand that the policies of the city and the migration to “Christian schools” for the past 50 years are responsible. However, the students of today remain your paramount mission, and I wish fervently that they enjoy the same quality of education and inspiration that I so richly benefited from. New physical facilities are nice, but they are no substitute for quality teaching and a shared sense of values.

The renaming of Robert E. Lee High School has become a distraction in fulfilling your duties to the taxpayers and parents and students in the Tyler Independent School District. A good education should not be partisan. Nostalgia has its place, but it is no substitute for learning history and how to apply those lessons to current problems and decision making.

I urge you to rename the school. This will likely be unpopular, but it is time. The education of students is about their future, not the past.

David Clem, Johnson City

RIDICULOUS

The name change for Tyler REL is ridiculous. No matter what you would change it to, someone would make it a point to go back 200 years or so to object. Just leave things alone. Do not keep trying to change for change’s sake; you will not satisfy these people.

Lynne Justice, Tyler

I write in support of Trude Lamb and as a bicentennial graduate (‘76) of Robert E. Lee High School. When I was a sophomore in 1973, I developed an important friendship with a girl in my speech class. I would have never met Janet in my academic classes because the honors classes for which I qualified were all white. I would have never met her in Southern Belles, the school’s drill team, either. When Janet walked home with me for lunch on several occasions, my neighborhood up Copeland Road erupted with concerns. Janet was black and I was not.

I’ve been reflecting on the Rebels-turned-Red Raiders that I cheered at Rose Stadium and the cannon that boomed at touchdowns and the Southern Gentlemen that set the fuse. I reflected on Janet’s chances to thrive in conditions that dismissed her and all the Black students in an environment that mirrored little else but white supremacy and Confederate pride. If you have any doubts, take a look at the lyrics of the school song.

When school opens this fall at Lee, 44 years after my graduation, I hope that the moral sensibilities of those in power include empathy and compassion enough to acknowledge the power of a name. In a city with an abundance of churches and that has a western notch in the Bible Belt, the question begs an answer: What WOULD Jesus do?

Janet died not too long ago, still in her 50s. I came across her obituary in a clutch of curiosity about old friends. Still, her lifetime wasn’t long enough for her to see Tyler evolve with the rest of the country, with all the schools that have honorably replaced names representative of oppression and exclusion with names more fitting to the promise of our unalienable rights of “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” for every young citizen in our nation.

Sharon Hope Fabriz, Sacramento, California