Name a Cary school

Can you do a drive-by on a whole city? Probably not, but the recent report on a local station's 11 o'clock news was close.

In a story about the Wake County school board's decision not to name a school on Cary's Alston Avenue after the road, lest it be confused with a like-named avenue in Durham, the station aired file footage of flashing cop-car lights and yellow crime-scene tape.

The crime had occurred, presumably, on Durham's Alston Avenue, but one also took place in the meeting where a news producer must've said, "Hey, we've got some great, inflammatory file footage to go with the school board story."

The message was clear -- Alston Avenue in Cary: good. Alston Avenue in Durham: bad.

As a proud Durham resident -- OK, proud most of the time -- I was offended and wondered what school board members said when rejecting "Alston Elementary School."

My sense is that the board, contrary to the TV station's implications, demurred on naming the school Alston Elementary not because Alston is more notorious than other Durham avenues but because it is a prominent Durham street. Period.

Since Durham and Cary are so connected in the public's consciousness -- tee hee -- it's understandable that some board members would vote to protect Cary's identity.

Board member Eleanor Goettee told me Monday that the naming of the school is not an issue she's "going to fall on a sword over ... but some members feel that schools shouldn't be named after a subdivision, the street it's on or a person," she said. "We sent [the proposal] back to staff to bring us some more suggestions."

Suggestions? Hmm, let's run these names up the school flagpole and see if they flutter:

How about Patrice Lumumba Elementary School, named after the assassinated first prime minister of the Republic of the Congo.

Or Crispus Attucks Elementary, named after the man regarded as the first to die in the runup to the Revolution.

I tried to reach board member Beverley Clark, who proposed "Alston Elementary," but she was in Boston and incommunicado. You reckon she'll swing by and see the statue of Attucks on Boston Common and propose his name for the school?

As far as I know, Durham has neither a Lumumba- nor an Attucks-named school, so the path is all clear for you, Cary.

If those names are too exotic and distant, how about Malcolm X Magnet Elementary School. The SAS employees who live in the Kitts Creek subdivision could boast that their kids got A's for doing a report on Malcolm's hajj to Mecca.

They could also boast the only kids who know that he wasn't called "Malcolm the 10th."

Too intense?

Probably. In that case, why not just name the school after the least controversial person I know, someone about whom nobody says anything bad -- but nobody says anything good, either, except that he had a sweet jump shot?

That's right: Name it after Michael Jordan.