Georgia school hopes to rename elementary school after Michelle Obama

The first lady has family ties to the Clayton County

Oct 7, 2020

Michelle Obama may soon have a school named after her. South Clayton Elementary School of Georgia wants to name the facility after Obama. The Clayton County Board of Education took a vote and decided to rename the school the Michelle Obama STEM Elementary School.

But first, the school district needs to reach out to Obama before they can officially make the change.

“We are going to make contact with the family because we have to get permission,” board chairwoman Jessie Goree said recently, per AJC.

“She actually does have some lineage to Clayton County,” Goree said of Obama at a board meeting in September. The former first lady indeed has ties in Clayton County. Her great-great-great-grandmother, Melvinia Shields, was a slave before the Civil War on a farm in Rex, a village in Clayton County so small that GPS won’t even pick it up.

According to AJC , Sheilds was born in South Carolina and came to the farm when she was just six-years-old.

This isn’t the first time Obama has had a site named after her. According to The Hill in March of 2019, Obama’s alma mater, Whitney Young Magnet High School in Chicago named its athletic center after her. And back in June of 2013, an elementary school in Panorama City, Caifornia was renamed as the Michelle Obama Elementary School.

If Obama declines, the school has to go with plan B. Though Obama was the Board of Education’s first choice by a 7-2 vote, the late U.S. Congressman and civil rights activist John Lewis is on their list as a second choice.

“Both of them are great individuals,” Goree said before the vote was called. “All of us are willing to go one way or the other.”

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