Robert E. Lee Elementary School in Austin, Texas will soon have a new name, and an Internet poll has made honoring Donald Trump and Adolf Hitler popular choices among voters.
When the Austin Independent School District agreed last month to give up the Lee name, the board announced it would be accepting nominations through an online portal. More than 240 suggestions were received by April 15, and on Friday the school board announced the most popular submissions.
Donald J. Trump Elementary came in first-place with 45 nominations, while keeping the school named in honor of the Civil War general ranked second after receiving 34 votes, the school board said.
Other submissions of note include the Adolf Hitler School for Friendship and Tolerance, which received eight votes, and a lone vote for Adam Lanza’s School of Fun, an apparent reference to the 20-year-old Connecticut man who perpetrated a mass-shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in 2012 and claimed 28 lives, including his own.
Austin’s KXAN, an NBC News affiliate, reported Friday that security was increased at the soon-to-be-former Lee Elementary after the results of the vote were announced.
Jacob Barrett, spokesman for the AISD, told TIME on Monday that the online voting page had few restrictions in place and allowed individuals to make suggestions anonymously.
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“The process was basically just a web form. The community members could submit basically whatever name they wanted,” he told TIME. “They could supply their contact information if they wanted to, but they weren’t required to. A lot of that was anonymous.”
The Austin ISD board voted on March 28 rename Lee Elementary, making it the only school in the district to rethink its ties with the Confederacy in the wake of a national firestorm that intensified last year, according to the Statesman newspaper.
“Change is hard and even progress is hard,” board President Kendall Pace said at the time. “But attitudes evolve, and in my opinion, we can honor the past and embrace a new future. And who we honor by the names of our buildings matters.
“Our nation’s history is important and our students should be required to learn it and none of us should ever forget it. And students should not be required to attend schools named for people who made a choice to lead the fight to keep a race of people in slavery … The time has come not to change history, but to honor it differently and it is time to honor the equality of our fellow man.”
Despite the results of the online poll, the school board will ultimately have the final say in the naming decision, the Statesman reported.
• Andrew Blake can be reached at ablake@washingtontimes.com.
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