It hasn't formally been officially raised, but the issue of whether to rename Robert E. Lee High School is expected to soon be a consideration again for the North East ISD, News Radio 1200 WOAI reports.
"I expect we will have some comments from the floor at the next school board meeting," one NEISD official told News Radio 1200 WOAI. "Its hard to tell where it goes from there."
Naming the high school after the Confederate Army Commander has been problematic for decades. In 1991, the school board removed the Confederate Battle Flag as the school's symbol. In 2015, activists and students, joined by former Mayor and then HUD Secretary Julian Castro, urged that the name be changed in the wake of the massacre at a South Carolina church by a white supremacist gunman.
“There are other, more appropriate individuals to honor and spotlight as role models for our young people,” Castro wrote at the time in a Facebook post.
Schools have come under fire statewide as the propriety of naming places of learning after Confederate figures is increasingly questioned.
Dallas ISD Board of Education President Dan Micchice says every school in the district which is named after a Confederate officials will undergo a review at a meeting next week.
"No action will be taken at that meeting, but at that meeting, we will be considering whether that process should be changed," he said.
In the San Antonio ISD, the name of Jeff Davis Middle School was changed to S. J. Davis Middle school in the last decade.
The renaming of Lee High School could open the floodgates in San Antonio. Many of the defenders of the Alamo were slave holders, including James Bowie and William Barret Travis, both of whom have schools and streets named for them. William Tobin, patriarch of the Tobin family that the Tobin Center is named for, was a Confederate officer.