Schools named for Robert E. Lee are looking for other Lees to serve as their namesake

Stripping a school of its Confederate namesake is complicated and costly.

For the hundreds of schools named for Robert E. Lee, choosing a new name amid nationwide protests also means replacing signs, uprooting turf fields, and reissuing sport uniforms. So to avoid some of the trouble, some schools have tried to find new namesakes who share the Confederate general's surname, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Take Lee Elementary in Oklahoma City. Administrators at first didn't even know if the school was named for Robert E. Lee, but after a bit of digging, they found it was and renamed it Adelaide Lee after a local philanthropist. Houston went for Russell Lee Elementary after a Depression era photographer, and also swapped a school named for confederate soldier Sidney Lanier to former Mayor Bob Lanier, the Journal notes.

Robert E. Lee High School in San Antonio, Texas, went a different route. Estimates found that it would cost $1.3 million to remove and replace everything with the Lee name, the Journal reports. So it rebranded as Legacy of Educational Excellence High School, stuck with its old school colors, and saved about $1 million by only swapping "things that had Robert E.," a spokesperson told the Journal. And Washington-Lee High School in Arlington, Virginia — known as W-L High School — went entirely uncontroversial and changed the L to "Liberty."

Read more at The Wall Street Journal.