EL SOBRANTE, Calif. - West Contra Costa Unified School District on Wednesday unanimously voted to rename one of their middle schools after an iconic and much decorated 99-year-old Rosie the Riveter Park Ranger.
The district's Juan Crespi Middle School will become Betty Reid Soskin Middle School. In a press release, the district said the vote came after an eight-month process that involved community meetings, surveys and a student, ‘What’s in a Name' project, developed by the history department that examined Crespi, who was an 18th-century Spanish missionary, and researched his impact on indigenous people.
"I am a firm believer in giving people their flowers while they are still here to smell them," the school's principal, Guthrie Fleischman said. "There are so few schools named after women and fewer named after women of color and even fewer named after Black women."
Soskin was chosen for her contributions as an activist, but also for her longtime stewardship at Richmond's Rosie the Riveter WWII Home Front National Historical Park. She has shown much resilience throughout the years. That resilience was tested recently when she was attacked in a home-invasion robbery in 2016 where one of the items stolen included a commemorative coin given to her by President Barack Obama for being the nation's oldest park ranger.
In 2019, Soskin suffered a stroke, but returned to work five months later. Other accolades include being honored by Glamour magazine in their ‘Women of the Year’ issue.
The school's renaming comes one-year after the intense social justice movement and protests sparked by police shootings of unarmed Black men, as well as the toppling of Confederate statues and other symbols of white supremacy across the nation.
The school district imagined how it could re-emerge from a lengthy pandemic just as debate over critical race theory, and how educators implement the history of racism in America into their curriculum, heats up.
"The district must be agents of change," district Trustee Jamela Smith-Folds said. "Naming a middle school Betty Reid Soskin is creating conditions for positive change. We are actively moving away from the harmful history of Juan Crespi and toward the inspiring life of Ms. Soskin."
The other option for renaming the school presented to the community was Chochenyo Middle School, in honor of the Ohlone tribe whose land the District currently inhabits, according to the district.
"Betty Reid Soskin is a national icon, leader, and symbol of inspiration in the [West Contra Costa Unified School District] community," fellow Trustee Demetrio Gonzalez-Hoy said. "I am thankful to the now Betty Reid Soskin community to be a small part of the process of this renaming and to the families, communities, and especially the students who advocated for this change."