(Photo via Facebook)

(Photo via Facebook)

After two years of heated debate and discussion, the Fairfax County School Board voted last week to rename a high school that honors a Confederate general.

“It is clear that this issue has had an impacted our [sic] community and it is my sincere hope that we move forward toward a more unified community,” Superintendent Scott Brabrand said in a statement on Friday.

J.E.B. Stuart High School was named nearly 60 years ago in the wake of Brown v. Board of Education, one of several schools in the county that are named for Confederates. James Ewell Brown Stuart was a prominent cavalry commander in the Confederate Army.

In 2015, students began a campaign calling for J.E.B. Stuart to be renamed, which bitterly divided the community.

A similar debate recently played out in Rockville, where a public statue of a Confederate soldier was recently moved to private land after two years of discussion. Alexandria, meanwhile, is slowly moving forward on a name change for Jefferson Davis Highway, while efforts to remove a Confederate statue have stalled.

In Fairfax, the school board created a committee to review the school name, but the committee wasn’t able to come to a consensus. That left the decision in the board’s hands. Members voted 7-2, with two abstentions, on Thursday to rechristen the school.

Fairfax has estimated that a complete name change would cost more than $675,000, according to the Washington Post, and the school board has directed the school to seek private funding to pay for the change. The board also requested that the community consider “Stuart High School” as the new name, as a partial change would be less expensive.

Brabrand writes that the school will follow the process laid out in school regulations to determine the new name.

There will be a meeting on September 9 to gather ideas for consideration, and voting will take place on September 16. The division superintendent will then make a recommendation to the school board based on the top three vote-getters.

J.E.B. Stuart will be renamed by the 2019 school year.