The wait is over — Howard County’s 13th high school in Jessup will bear the name Guilford Park High School, the Board of Education voted unanimously Feb. 9.

“It’s like something that you prayed for has actually come to pass,” said Clarksville resident Joan Carter-Smith, 71, who grew up in Guilford. “It’s an awesome feeling. I can’t even describe it.”

The decision caps a months long naming process and comes after the board delayed its initial vote in January after voicing dissatisfaction with a list of recommended school names, all of which contained the word “quarry.”

The board ultimately discarded quarry and other finalists to name the school after Guilford, a historic unincorporated community in the county’s southeast. The new building sits a short drive from Guilford Elementary School, which was founded as a one-room schoolhouse serving the county’s Black residents in the early 1900s.

“Guilford ... reflects the rich history of our African American community living there, working there,” said board member Jennifer Swickard Mallo. “I do like the idea of honoring that rich legacy of what our families and our community has brought to us.”

At its Jan. 12 meeting, the board directed the 37-member naming committee to reconvene to create a new “list of diverse names” and solicit suggestions from the high school’s future student body. A subsequent survey sent out last month to the nearly 800 students that will populate the school generated 115 responses.

Mission High School proved to be the most popular choice (32 submissions), followed by Jessup High School (six submissions), Mission Heights High School (five submissions) and Quarry Heights High School (five submissions). Various names with the word “Guilford” were submitted seven times.

Despite the popularity of mission, which refers to the road adjacent to the new school, committee historian Renee Bos warned in November that the term “puts together some cultural proficiency issues when we’re looking at a public school system.”

According to Bos, Mission Road derives its name from a Roman Catholic novitiate that opened in the area in 1936 to train budding theologians bound for the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C.

Quarries, committee co-chair Patrick J. Saunderson stated, were a unifying characteristic of the region, which opened its first granite quarry in 1834, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. The board decided against quarry after a number of residents spoke out against the word, which they argued would tie the school to an existing commercial enterprise and was too hard to pronounce.

Policy 6050, which governs the naming and renaming of the county’s public schools, dictates that schools must be named for geographic terms, including “physical and human geographic features,” in the surrounding area. Schools cannot be named for an individual and the duplication of names or initials of other schools in the district should be avoided.

So far as the committee could determine, Guilford’s name traced its origins to a location in England and not any specific individual.

For Carter-Smith, who attended Guilford Elementary while it was still segregated, the final name pays homage to the Black community that thrived along Mission Road before the growth of Columbia and Interstate 95 forced many older residents to move.

Her great-great-grandfather, the Rev. Willis Carter, found work in Guilford’s quarries in the 1890s and helped start the First Baptist Church of Guilford, which provided housing, food and education to the town’s growing Black population.

“[Guilford] doesn’t get the acknowledgment that it deserves,” Carter-Smith said. “It just always gets kicked under the rug.”

Talia Roogow, 13, said she’s relieved the drawn-out naming process is over and is excited to attend Guilford Park as a freshman. She plans on participating in a meeting next week led by Guilford Park Principal Josh Wasilewski to start the school’s mascot selection process.

“The principal seems amazing,” said Roogow’s mother, Sarah. “It’s evident that he’s working really hard to engage the community and the kids already.”

Construction on Guilford Park is approximately 80% complete as of January and the school is on pace to open its doors to its inaugural freshman and sophomore classes for the 2023-24 school year. While its mascot is still up in the air, the school’s official colors were preselected as blue and green, to aid with room motifs during construction.

Carter-Smith hopes students get the opportunity to learn about their school’s namesake when they enter Guilford Park’s brand-new doors in the fall.

“I just want them to learn how Guilford really originated and how it started,” she said. “There were some great people that originated from Guilford and their most important thing in life was education.”

To learn more about Guilford Park High School, go to www.hcpss.org/guilford-park.