Tuesday marked the fourth day of trial over the Shenandoah County School Board's decision to reinstate Confederate names on two schools last year. Three witnesses testified, including two school board members. WMRA's Randi B. Hagi reports.
The day's proceedings began with testimony from Professor Amy Bass, who teaches sports studies at Manhattanville University. Her scholarship focuses on the intersection of sports, culture, and politics. Bass testified that sports provide crucial developmental benefits to students, and that Confederate symbols in schools and on team paraphernalia undermine "the principles of inclusivity and equality that school athletics should promote."
Next, the defendants called School Board Chair Dennis Barlow to the stand. Barlow is originally from Baltimore. He served in the Army for 29 years, including teaching assignments, and moved to Shenandoah County in 2005. He said that when the Confederate names were removed in 2020, "it was basically a local uproar," in part because the decision was made on such short notice, with little opportunity for public input.
Barlow was elected to the school board to represent the Stonewall Jackson High School, then called Mountain View, district in 2021. He said the residents in this part of the county have historically felt they didn't have sufficient education funding, and so a robust booster club "created a lot of sports infrastructure" for the high school.
In 2022, the board was composed of what Barlow described as three newly-elected conservative members, including himself, and three more liberal members. They discussed conducting a professional survey of the county's sentiments on the school names, but Barlow says the liberal bloc pulled their support for the survey, and the board deadlocked on a vote to reinstate the Confederate names that year.
In cross-examination, plaintiffs' attorney Jason Raofield dug into Barlow's participation in the Confederate names advocacy group, "The Coalition for Better Schools," before and after his election to the board. In a 2021 email to his daughter, Barlow says the group is working "to fend off the vicious attacks of woke Democrats."
Barlow asked his daughter to design a logo for the group, but said he didn't want it to look like the Shenandoah County seal – that the female farmer on it looks like "a Mexican sharecropper" or "waif." He said in court that the word "waif" was a family inside joke, by which he meant "stray child."
Both Raofield and the judge asked Barlow about another email exchange he was copied on with School Board Member Brandi Rutz and members of the coalition and a closely related organization, "The Freedom Press." In it, a community member discusses their strategy for waiting to request a vote on Confederate names until after the "change of the board's attorney."
Upon questioning, Barlow said he wanted to terminate their attorney at the time both because she had espoused liberal positions and been more aligned with the superintendent than the board.
Raofield also asked Barlow about a survey conducted by the coalition and its leader, Mike Scheibe, in 2024. That survey was sent to residents in the southern part of the county to gauge their opinions on the school names. As WMRA previously reported, Scheibe was elected to the school board last month, but did not disclose a prior felony conviction when he filed to run for office, and is now facing a legal challenge over his eligibility. Barlow said he was not aware of Scheibe's criminal record before it came out in the news.
The final witness Tuesday was School Board Member Kyle Gutshall, who's also finishing up his four-year term this year. He's a lifelong resident of the county, and a graduate of Central High School and JMU. While he was also "not a fan" of the board's "rushed" 2020 decision, in 2024 he cast the lone vote against reinstating the Confederate names. Gutshall said the majority of comments he heard from constituents were in favor of keeping the names Mountain View and Honey Run, and he recalled hearing from Black students at school board meetings who said the Confederate names made them feel unwelcome.
The issue of legislative privilege came up several times throughout the day. That's the legal doctrine the defendants invoked before trial so they could refuse to answer questions or produce documents about why the board made their decisions about the names. Senior U.S. District Judge Michael F. Urbanski repeatedly reminded the defendants that they could not now pick and choose what to reveal about those reasons in the courtroom.
The final two witnesses are scheduled to testify on Wednesday.
