Comments on Renaming Schoenbar Middle School and Ketchikan High School

The following is a paraphrase of the public comment I made to the Ketchikan school board on June 26th, 2024. Please note that although I am an employee of the Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District, the following article represents my personal views only, not those of my employer or any other entity.

I strongly encourage the Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District Board of Education to vote to recommend to the Ketchikan Gateway Borough Assembly that

1. Schoenbar Middle School be renamed Kichx̱áan Héeni Middle School, and,
2. that Ketchikan High School — the school, not just the building — be renamed Ḵaax̱gal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich High School.

I wrote about Schoenbar Middle School’s name extensively back in February, but to address that school’s name again briefly:

In 1965, the Ketchikan school board made an unfortunate mistake in naming Schoenbar Middle School after a man who made no significant impact on Ketchikan’s history, other than leaving our community with unpaid debts of over $200,000, adjusted for inflation. It does not make that decision any less of a mistake that it was made nearly 60 years ago, nor does fixing that mistake make any less sense, even if it is fixed 60 years later. It's better late than never.

The middle school should be named after the major geographic feature it sits beside, Kichx̱áan Héeni — Ketchikan Creek — without which our community would not have developed and grown to become the place we know and love today. This action would provide our 7th and 8th-grade students with a school name they can be proud of, and a meaning for their school's name that better connects them and us to our history.

Kichxháan Héeni (Ketchikan Creek): Without it, Kichxháan (Ketchikan) would not exist.

Now, regarding Ketchikan High School:

First, it must be said there is no major issue with the current name of Ketchikan High School, like there is with Schoenbar. Ketchikan is the anglicization of Kichx̱áan, the original name of this community, so of course I have no problem with that name. However, you could argue that Ketchikan High School isn’t a very creative or unique name, and it might also seem exclusionary, given that it isn’t actually the only high school in Ketchikan, as the name might seem to imply.

While the school’s current name isn’t a big problem, there is a real issue in this community when it comes to Ketchikan High School’s most famous graduate, Ḵaax̱gal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich: Even as she has been increasingly recognized around the state and across the nation as a heroine whose actions were critical to the history of Alaska and civil rights, she has still not received nearly enough public recognition in Ketchikan. To my knowledge, the only public space in Ketchikan that is named for her is the theater inside the Southeast Alaska Discovery Center.

Some people might conclude that if there’s a problem with Schoenbar’s name, and a problem of Elizabeth Peratrovich not being recognized enough, the solution should be simple: The middle school should be named Ḵaax̱gal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich Middle School. I disagree. I’m a big believer in commemorating history in the most direct and relevant way possible, so it only makes sense to apply Elizabeth's name to the school that she attended and graduated from, which is Ketchikan High School. Naming a school after her that did not even exist while she was alive doesn't make as much sense to me.

(She died in 1958, and the middle school wasn't built until 1965. Although, maybe if the 1965 school board had their heads screwed on right, they could have named the middle school after her from the beginning, given that she was a local heroine who had passed away not too many years before.)

There was a proposal made that Ketchikan High School itself not be renamed, but rather, only the building that houses it should be named the Elizabeth Peratrovich building. I strongly disagree with this approach, and I consider this proposal to be a half measure that does not fully honor Ḵaax̱gal.aat the way she deserves. As far as I can tell, only one school building in the Ketchikan Gateway Borough School District has its own distinct name — the Valley Park building. That building having its own name makes perfect sense, since it has two separate schools of approximately equal size housed within it. It is entirely logical and quite useful to maintain a name for the whole building, since two different schools occupy each half.

Ketchikan High School, while it has had various other offices and programs housed inside it over the years, will always be much larger than anything else in the building. It will always be called the high school, regardless of what else is there. Hardly anyone would refer to the building by a special building name when the high school has been and presumably always will be the primary occupant.

I am also well aware that people will always use shortened names of schools for convenience, and I think we are very fortunate that Elizabeth Peratrovich’s Lingít name starts with a K (really a Ḵ, but we can still call it “kay”). That means Ḵaax̱gal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich High School would still be “Kayhi”!

(I also googled “KEPHS” and “KEP High School,” and I couldn’t find any high schools in the U.S. with those initials, or much competition for Google results.)

I am not so naïve as to believe that everyone would say “Ḵaax̱gal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich High School” or “Ḵaax̱gal.aat High School” out loud all the time, but all of us are perfectly capable of learning how to pronounce her Lingít name for the times when we would say the full name of the school. And, when we would continue to say the nickname “Kayhi,” the “kay” would represent one of our community’s greatest heroines.

I hope the school I work at will be named after Khaaxhgal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich in the near future.

Lastly, I wanted to address three objections I have seen or anticipate seeing from community members:

1. It is not unfair to or unrepresentative of Haida or Tsimshian people (or people of any other culture) in Ketchikan to name one school after a Lingít place name and another after a Lingít individual. Haida and Tsimshian people have always honored Lingít place names when they moved to places with Lingít names. The original names of this community are Lingít. And, Ḵaax̱gal.aat fought “for the rights of all,” not just the rights of Lingít.
2. In no way does renaming these schools “erase history.” As a history teacher and historian, I find any use of that phrase in regard to this issue to be incredibly ignorant and misguided. John Shoenbar has been far more memorialized than he ever deserved to be, and the fact that the middle school was named for him this long — and the fact that so much has been written about him now — means he will never be “erased” from history. Names in our community should honor the parts of our history that reflect our values. Changing names doesn’t change history, but it does show what we want for our community. I do not want Ketchikan to keep honoring a conman.
3. Likely the most common objection to these name change proposals will be cost. It does not seem like a “good look” for a school district in a budget crisis to make a decision that seemingly might cost thousands of dollars for new signage. However, as Ketchikan Gateway Borough clerk Kacie Paxton explained in a recent memo, the Juneau School District changed several of its school names at little to no cost to the public: Signs were not changed right away, and costs were deferred until regular maintenance was going to happen anyway. Or, outside grants were found to pay for changes. It costs nothing for staff to take a few minutes to change names in documents and on websites, and there is no extra cost to put a different name on uniforms that were going to be purchased anyway. Meanwhile, when these changes mean that we can have students, teachers, and our community honor history we can truly treasure—that return on investment is priceless.

Ultimately, I believe renaming our main middle school Kichx̱áan Héeni Middle School and our main high school Ḵaax̱gal.aat Elizabeth Peratrovich High School will be significant steps to highlight our community values, reconnect us with our roots, and honor some incredible parts of our history and cultural heritage.

Please feel encouraged to leave a comment below if you have questions, criticisms, or other thoughts to share.