Thank you to our students, staff, families and community members who submitted name ideas for our new elementary school, scheduled to open in fall 2020. We received more than 700 submissions! The Elementary #21 Naming Committee has carefully reviewed the ideas and narrowed the selection down to 11 names. Now, we’d like your help in further narrowing the choices. 

The following are 11 name ideas, along with information about the significance of each name that is under consideration. We encourage students, staff, families and community members to once again submit their feedback from the 11 names listed. At the same time, we will also collect feedback from focus groups made up of students who will attend the new elementary. Survey responses can be submitted through Friday, Nov. 15.

Once the feedback window closes, the Committee will meet to review the feedback and finalize three to five recommended names for the School Board. At their Dec. 9 meeting, the School Board will select, approve and announce the name of our newest elementary school.

Name Guidelines

The name selection by the Committee was guided by Policy 9250: Facilities Naming, which was approved by the School Board in 2017 and sets clear criteria and guidelines for school names.

• The name should be known and significant to the Northshore community; or
• The name should identify the geographic area of the community served by the school; or
• The name should honor a prominent individual, known locally or nationally, who has made a long-term contribution to the education of children. If a person’s name is selected for Elementary #21, then in keeping with the Board’s desire for inclusion and equitable recognition, it will be named after an individual who is a part of a minoritized community.

Survey

This survey is a multi-step process:

• First, you will provide feedback on each name individually.
• At the end of the survey you will order all of the names according to your preference.

Click NEXT to begin!

Ruby Bridges was born Sept. 8, 1954 in Tylertown, Mississippi. She became a symbol of the Civil Rights Movement and at age six was the youngest of a group of African American students to integrate schools in the American South.

Bridges was the eldest of eight children, born into poverty in Mississippi. When she was four years old, her family moved to New Orleans. Two years later a test was given to the city’s African American school children to determine which students could enter all-white schools. Bridges passed the test and was selected for enrollment at the city’s William Frantz Elementary School.

Of the six African American students designated to integrate the school, Bridges was the only one to enroll. On Nov. 14, 1960, her first day, she was escorted to school by four federal marshals. On Bridges’ second day, Barbara Henry, a young teacher from Boston, began to teach her. The two worked together in an otherwise vacant classroom for an entire year. Every day as the marshals escorted Bridges to school, they urged her to keep her eyes forward so that she would not have to see the racist remarks scrawled across signs or the faces of the protesters. Toward the end of the year, the crowds began to thin, and by the following year the school had enrolled several more black students.

Bridges’ bravery inspired the Norman Rockwell painting The Problem We All Live With (1964), which depicts the young Bridges walking to school between two sets of marshals, a racial epithet marking the wall behind them. Her memoir, “Through My Eyes,” was released in 1999, the same year that she established the Ruby Bridges Foundation, which used educational initiatives to promote tolerance and unity among school children. [Source]

Bridges Elementary has a double meaning and represents both an individual and a metaphor. It represents Ruby Bridges and how she symbolizes youth voices and activism. It also ties into the importance of building bridges within the school and community. 

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was born March 15, 1933, in Brooklyn, New York.

She attended Cornell University on a full scholarship and completed her legal education at Columbia Law School. In 1970 Ginsburg became professionally involved in gender equality when she was asked to introduce and moderate a law student panel discussion on the topic of “women’s liberation.”

In 1971 she published two law review articles on the subject and taught a seminar on gender discrimination. As a part of the course, Ginsburg partnered with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) to draft briefs in two federal cases. During the remainder of the 1970s, Ginsburg was a leading figure in gender-discrimination litigation. In 1972 she became founding counsel of the ACLU’s Women’s Rights Project and coauthored a law-school casebook on gender discrimination. In the same year, she became the first tenured female faculty member at Columbia Law School.

In 1980 Ginsburg was appointed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in Washington, D.C. On June 14, 1993, Ginsburg was nominated to the Supreme Court. Her confirmation made her only the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court. [Source]

Cecile Ann Hansen -- a descendant within the family of Chief Si 'ahl ("Chief Seattle") -- has served as the elected chair of her people since 1975. During those decades the Duwamish (or in the Salish language of Lushootseed: the Dkhw'Duw'Absh) have made much progress in the ongoing efforts to nurture their arts, language, and culture. But Hansen's original goal -- and the driving imperative behind her sustained efforts ever since -- has simply been to "correct an injustice," or more precisely: a multitude of injustices that have faced the Duwamish. These range from the initial loss of their traditional lands (the town site of Seattle and much of King County) via the Point Elliot Treaty of 1855, to the loss of their fishing rights along the Duwamish River, to the even more tragic refusal of the federal government to grant them official recognition as a legitimate historic tribe.

These many years later, Hansen's motto of "We're still here" is uttered with a sense of beleaguered pride in her people's fortitude.

Yet, under Hansen and the Duwamish Council's leadership major steps continue to be made in the betterment of the Duwamish people's state. In 2004 they moved their tribal offices to a tiny rental house on Seattle's West Marginal Way, which is across the street from their ancestral lands along the river for which they are named.  There, they mounted and managed a sustained fundraising drive which culminated in the acquisition of a larger plot of land next door, and finally the construction of the Duwamish Longhouse and Cultural Center, which opened in December 2008. [Source]

Vi Hilbert was born July 24, 1918, in Upper Skagit. She attended the Chemawa Indian Boarding School, located near Salem, Oregon, but for her last years, she transferred to Franklin High in Portland. 

Hilbert was a story-teller, linguist, a fluent speaker in Lushootseed and co-author of the second Lushootseed dictionary, advisor on the first one and an educator.

In 1967, Hilbert was introduced to Dr. Thom Hess, who was writing a grammar of Lushootseed, then called Puget Salish. In 1972, she attended a Lushootseed class that Hess had taught at the University of Washington and passed all the tests easily. The next year, Hess arranged  for Hilbert to teach the class. Together she and Hess wrote lesson plans for daily language classes.

Hilbert shared traditions, stories and the Lushootseed language with the Burke Museum, United Indians of all tribes, Tillicum Village, the Seattle’s Story Teller Guild, and the National Storytelling Association. She taught at the University of Washington for 15 years before retiring in 1988. Hilbert was named a Washington State Living Treasure in 1989. Then in 1994, she received a National Heritage Fellowship from the National Endowment of Arts.

Hilbert passed away in 2008. [Source]

Dorothy Louise Harris Johnson was born May 31, 1919 in Dallas, Texas. She attended Wiley College and earned her Bachelor of Arts in Education. She found and married the love of her life, Clifford Paul (C.P.) Johnson in 1943. D. Johnson received her master’s degree in Special Education at the University of Washington.

As a teacher and then Coordinator of Special Education for the Shoreline School District, D. Johnson was a nationally recognized expert. Her expertise was innovative learning techniques to increase learning.The couple moved to Bothell in 1961.

In 1988, D. Johnson worked with Northshore’s School Board to implement the C.P. Johnson Humanitarian Award for students. This program was in effect for 20 years.

During the 2018-19 school year, the recognition program was relaunched by Northshore School District in honor of both C.P. Johnson and D. Johnson, who dedicated their lives to improving the lives of all children in our community.  As part of this honor, the District annually recognizes two students from each school who display the characteristics of a humanitarian in their school and community.

D. Johnson passed away in 2011.

Katherine Johnson was born in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia in 1918.  Her intense curiosity and brilliance with numbers vaulted her ahead several grades in school. By 13, she was attending the high school located on the campus of historically black West Virginia State College. At 18, she enrolled in the college itself and became only the third African American to earn a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

In 1952, Johnson took a position at the all-black West Area Computing section at the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics’ (NACA’s) Langley laboratory.

She did trajectory analysis for Alan Shepard’s May 1961 mission Freedom 7, America’s first human spaceflight. In 1960, she coauthored a report laying out the equations describing an orbital spaceflight in which the landing position of the spacecraft is specified. It was the first time a woman in the Flight Research Division had received credit as an author of a research report.

In 1962, as NASA prepared for the orbital mission of John Glenn, Johnson was called upon to do the work that she would become most known for. As a part of the preflight checklist, Glenn asked engineers to “get the girl”—Johnson—to run the same numbers through the same equations that had been programmed into the computer, but by hand, on her desktop mechanical calculating machine. “If she says they’re good,’” Johnson remembers the astronaut saying, “then I’m ready to go.” [Source]

Poet, essayist, and novelist Audre Lorde was born on Feb. 18, 1934, in New York City.

While she was still in high school, her first poem appeared in Seventeen magazine. Lorde received her Bachelor of Arts from Hunter College and a Master of Library Science from Columbia University. She served as a librarian in New York public schools from 1961 through 1968.

In 1968, Lorde’s first volume of poems, “The First Cities,” was published and she also became the writer-in-residence at Tougaloo College in Mississippi, where she discovered a love of teaching. In 1976, W. W. Norton released her collection “Coal" and shortly thereafter published “The Black Unicorn.”

In the 1980s, Lorde and writer Barbara Smith founded Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press. She was also a founding member of Sisters in Support of Sisters in South Africa, an organization that worked to raise concerns about women under apartheid. Lorde became a professor of English at John Jay College of criminal justice and Hunter College. She was the poet laureate of New York from 1991-1992. “The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde” was published in 1997.

Lorde passed away in 1992. [Source]

Michelle Obama was born on Jan. 17, 1964, in Chicago, Illinois. Raised with an emphasis on education, both Obama and her brother learned to read at home by age four. Both skipped the second grade. By the sixth grade, she was taking classes in her school's gifted program, where she learned French and completed accelerated courses in biology.

Obama attended Princeton University, graduating cum laude in 1985 with a Bachelor of Arts in sociology and a minor in African American studies. She went on to study law at Harvard Law School, where she took part in demonstrations calling for the enrollment and hiring of more minority students and professors. She was awarded her J.D. in 1988.

After graduating law school, Obama worked as an associate in the Chicago branch of the firm Sidley Austin in the area of marketing and intellectual property. In 1989, while at the firm, she met Barack Obama.

In 2008 B. Obama was elected the 44th  President of the United States. As First Lady of the United States, M. Obama was involved in various causes, but  focused her attention on four primary initiatives: Let's Move!, Reach Higher, Let Girls Learn, and Joining Forces. Some other initiatives of hers included advocating on behalf of military families, helping working women balance career and family, encouraging national service, and promoting the arts and arts education. M. Obama remains committed to her health-and-wellness causes and supporting military families and spouses a personal mission. [Source]

Cecilia Helena Payne-Gaposchkin was born on May 10, 1900 in Wendover, England. At age eight, Payne decided to become a scientist. She studied calculus and coordinate geometry on her own. Her senior high school years were spent at St Paul’s Girls’ School in London where she was encouraged to love science. 

Payne-Gaposchkin entered the University of Cambridge in 1919. A lecture by astronomer Sir Arthur Eddington on his expedition to the island of Principe that confirmed Einstein’s theory of general relativity inspired her to become an astronomer. Eddington encouraged her ambition, but she felt there were more opportunities for a woman to work in astronomy in the United States than in Britain. In 1923, she received a fellowship to study at the Harvard College Observatory in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

In her Ph.D. thesis, Payne-Gaposchkin determined that stars are composed mostly of hydrogen and helium. She also established that stars could be classified according to their temperatures. Payne-Gaposchkin received the first Ph.D. in astronomy from Radcliffe College for her thesis, since Harvard did not grant doctoral degrees to women. Astronomers Otto Struve and Velta Zebergs later called her thesis “undoubtedly the most brilliant Ph.D. thesis ever written in astronomy.”

Payne-Gaposchkin passed away in 1979. [Source]

Sonia Sotomayor was born on June 25, 1954, in the Bronx borough of New York City.

Sotomayor graduated from Cardinal Spellman High School in the Bronx in 1972 and entered the Ivy League, attending Princeton University. Sotomayor graduated summa cum laude from Princeton in 1976. She was also awarded the Pyne Prize, which is the highest academic award given to Princeton undergraduates. That same year, Sotomayor entered Yale Law School, where she was an editor for the Yale Law Journal. She received her J.D. in 1979, passed the bar in 1980 and immediately began work as an assistant district attorney in Manhattan, serving as a trial lawyer.

In 1992 Sotomayor was nominated as a U.S. District Court judge. When she joined the court, she was its youngest judge. On her 43rd birthday, June 25, 1997, she was nominated for the U.S. Second Circuit Court of Appeals.

On May 26, 2009, Sotomayor was nominated for Supreme Court justice making her the first Latina Supreme Court justice in U.S. history. [Source]