At the meeting on the 25th February 2019, the school board unanimously approved a resolution to create a committee to suggest new names for Lee Middle, in Silver Spring, and asked for a review of existing school names to “ensure that all names are appropriate candidates for school facilities.” County Council President Nancy Navarro is pushing for a change based on Lee’s history that included implementing racist housing policies, forcing minorities from buying or renting homes in some subdivisions.

There are 206 public schools in Montgomery County serving about 163,000 students. Staff members have begun researching school facility names and the history of the people. Although a timeline for the review wasn’t given, it is an “in-depth process that will take a little time.”

Ten years after custody of the struggling Cobo Center transferred to a regional authority, the 59-year-old Detroit landmark has a new identity of fiscal responsibility — and a new name.

The Detroit Regional Convention Facility Authority said on 20th February it had struck a $33-million deal with Chemical Bank to rename one of the largest convention centers in the United States. Chemical Bank CEO Tom Shafer said the company will pay $1.5 million annually over 22 years for the naming rights. Should the bank’s merger with TCF Financial Corp., the center’s name would be the TCF Center. A new name will be finalized by the end of 2019.

Icelandic names have left many a foreigner puzzled and tongue tied. On the volcanic island in the North Atlantic lives a nation of a little over 350.000 people with it’s own language and a unique alphabet. Jón Jónson and Björk Guðmundsdóttir might seem like a random jumble of letters but in Iceland they are as mundane as boiling hot water shooting out of the earth.

Naming traditions in Iceland are fascinating and might seem complicated to the outside eye. Icelandic people often get questions from foreigners about their names. The following are answers given by Laufey Haraldsdóttir to some of the most common questions about Icelandic names.

A University of Minnesota task force has recommended changing the names of four Twin Cities campus buildings because of what it deemed their namesakes’ racist or anti-Semitic practices. The group’s report, released in February 20, comes after a 16-month process that some regents and students have criticized as overly plodding, with the task force following up last year on the work of an earlier committee. The task force backed renaming Coffman Memorial Union — for former U President Lotus Coffman, who presided over a major university expansion but also excluded black students from campus housing and programs — as well as three other buildings. President Eric Kaler will review that report and present his own proposal to the U’s governing board in March.