A state senator wants to change Alabama's new law on preserving historical monuments and buildings so that it does not restrict a local school district that wants to rename a school.

The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act has drawn attention mostly because it restricts or blocks the removal of historical monuments, including Confederate monuments, from public property.

But the law, passed by the Legislature earlier this year and signed by Gov. Kay Ivey, also restricts the renaming of any "memorial school" on public property.

Sen. Dick Brewbaker, R-Montgomery, said it should be up to local officials whether to change the name of a school. Brewbaker is working on a bill that he plans to pre-file before the legislative session, which starts Jan. 9.

"If there is a name of a school that's causing controversy in any community, you don't help anybody by making it a long, drawn out process, outside of local control, to change that name," Brewbaker said.

The senator, who is not running for reelection next year, is chairman of the Senate's Education and Youth Affairs Committee.

The Alabama Memorial Preservation Act defines a "memorial school" as any K-12 or two-year college facility named for a person, event, group, movement or military service.

Under the law, a local school board that wanted to rename a memorial school 20 years old or older would have to get a waiver from the Committee on Alabama Monument Protection, a new, 11-member group appointed by the governor, House speaker and Senate president pro tempore.

The law spells out minimum requirements and documentation to apply for a waiver, including written commentary from any "heritage, historical, genealogical, or preservation organizations" with an interest in a proposed name change.

Brewbaker said schools that are named after a person will eventually need to be replaced because buildings age and become outdated.

He said school systems should have the option of renaming schools in those cases, if, for example, a local philanthropist offers to donate land or money to support that effort and wants to have a say in the name. Brewbaker said that's unlikely to happen if there's a "long, torturous process that might get the philanthropist's name dragged through the mud."

"All old brick schools are not necessarily worth saving," Brewbaker said. "They're expensive to operate. And if you tear one down and in the process are going to rename it, it just seems a little ridiculous that you have to treat it like you're taking down a statue of Lafayette that was put in the town square in 1801."

Four Montgomery public schools carry Brewbaker's family name. That's because of the philanthropy of Brewbaker's grandfather, William S. Brewbaker, who made donations in honor of his wife, Cassie Leta Brewbaker, a longtime Montgomery public school teacher.

Brewbaker said there could be cases where changing a school name can be justified for educational reasons.

"On the educational side, one of the problems that we've got with certain groups of students is a real sense of alienation from the school as an institution," the senator said. "The research is pretty clear that if you're dealing with populations of students that don't feel connected to the school, it makes a difference if you do everything you can to make them feel like the school is a place they have a stake in.

"And so if communities think that school names are interfering with their educational mission or proving a distraction it makes sense that local boards ought to be able to change that not for historical reasons but for educational reasons."

Brewbaker notes that his bill does not change any school names, but restores the law to what it was a few months ago, before the Memorial Preservation Act took effect.

The senator said public education has enough challenges already without more distractions caused by treating them as historical memorials.

"Schools aren't monuments," Brewbaker said. "They're functional institutions."