SARANAC LAKE — It’s time for the public to have its final say on a mascot to represent the Saranac Lake Central School District Red Storm, and school leaders are asking anyone invested in that decision to vote online this week.

Voting in the online poll at at https://bit.ly/3qwXFSZ began on Monday and will last until June 12. But the lineup of three finalists to vote on has changed, as the school board chose to nix the fox and replace it with a “Storm Hero” option after public input.

School board member Justin Garwood, who reintroduced the idea of designing a mascot for the district last year, once again reiterated this is not a new logo and not a new name, but just a mascot to represent the Red Storm spirit, which it hasn’t had before.

“We are the Red Storm. That is not changing,” Garwood said. “The interlocking ‘SL’ letters, that will remain our logo. The name ‘Red Storm’ will remain the Red Storm.”

SLCSD has been the Red Storm since 2001. Before that, school teams played as the Redskins, a name that was retired by the school board over two decades ago. The insulting slang term for Native Americans was deemed too offensive at the time.

The district was not the first to make the hotly debated change, but it was ahead of the curve in terms of replacing racially insensitive sports team names. In July of this year, the New York state Education Department will officially ban all Native American mascots for schools in New York.

This voting caps off an eight-month process by the SLCSD Board of Education’s Mascot Subcommittee, which included two public hearings and three rounds of community submissions. Garwood felt there’s been lots of chances for public input.

“It was funny. On the night we had a $36 million budget to pass, people were more there to talk about the mascot,” Garwood said. “Hey, people are excited, so that’s a good thing.”

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The fox and the storm

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The lineup of the three finalists has changed. The final three to vote on are moose, red-tailed hawk and storm hero — the fox option has been dropped.

In the past few weeks, members of the public have attended public meetings to express concern about the former fox finalist, and to advocate for including a storm-based option. The school board agreed with these requests, removed fox and added storm.

“We figured, there’s no way to please everybody. But if we’re transparent, we listen to what the public is saying, and we respond, at least we’ll keep people as happy as possible,” Garwood said. “Not everybody’s going to be happy, I’m sure. But nobody can criticize us for not being transparent.”

Brook Varner, a teaching assistant at Bloomingdale Elementary School, raised concerns that the fox idea would be a public relations “liability.” And not just because SLCSD Superintendent Diane Fox bears the same name.

Varner said public perception of the animal is sometimes negative, and it is seen as a mischievous, sly, cheating creature. The term “foxy” is used to mean “sexy” and she thought parents wouldn’t like their children described as such.

Also, she said in “teen-speak,” fox is used as a stand-in for another, vulgar f-word. She pictured people making banners that say things like “for fox sake” or “no fox given.”

“This is exactly why we held this hearing,” SLCSD board Chair Mark Farmer said to Varner. He said the public sees things the board may not have and helps them vet the ideas.

Garwood said through the process of whittling down the mascot ideas, two “camps” emerged — those who feel strongly that the mascot should be an Adirondack animal, and those who feel strongly that the mascot should be a storm.

The board said they were willing to add storm if people submitted concept artwork for it themselves. Examples in the poll show anthropomorphic cyclones. Garwood felt in the two decades since the name change, it has been hard to find a way to represent a Red Storm, but he said not everyone feels the same.

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How the vote works

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Voters will be asked what their role is in the community — a student, district employee, community member or alum living elsewhere.

The poll uses ranked choice voting, so voters will vote for all three choices, in the order they like them. The poll tracks IP addresses for security, so there is one vote per device.

“All students are issued devices from school, which ensures their participation,” the poll reads.

People could still vote from several devices in their home, Garwood said, but this was the best they could do for security and ensuring everyone gets a vote.

The poll links to a slide show of potential logos, renderings, helmets and shirts for each choice, all original designs by locals. These images are not the final designs — the district plans to get a professional to do the work — but they will used to inform the final mascot design.

Voting will close on Monday at 10 p.m.

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Final vote may happen Wednesday

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After voting on the mascot closes, Garwood said the subcommittee will look at the data and see what sort of story it tells before presenting at a school board meeting on June 14.

Ultimately, the decision comes down to the school board’s vote. That vote will potentially happen on Wednesday, but that depends on how clean or complex the results are.

“It’d be great if it was clean and they all told the same story,” Garwood said. That would make for an easy decision.

He said they’ll look at the data from several different angles to get an idea of what different portions of the school community said with their votes.

If there’s not a clear winner, he said the board will have to talk about what they’ll do.

Garwood said he hopes this mascot can start to be used next school year.

He said the mascot will definitely be used on shirts, hats and banners, and depending on the final design, potentially on jerseys and a physical mascot costume. That remains to be seen, though, he said.

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Red Storm history

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In 2001, SLCSD changed its team name in a 6-1 vote with a lot of input from the community, as well as local Indigenous people. The district then selected a new name in a student poll, with the Red Storm earning 39% of the vote.

But Garwood said it’s always been challenging to find a visual representation for the Red Storm.

There was conversation back in the day about a logo or mascot, but nothing caught on.

The football team needed something for its helmets, so they adopted a decal of the “SL” letters intertwined. Other SLCSD teams tried hurricane emblems. But the interlacing SL letters became the standard logo for teams.

Garwood graduated from SLHS the year before the name change. Now he has children of his own and he wants to see his kids sporting Red Storm gear when they grow up in the district.

He said he remembers when he was in school, people were rocking Redskins gear everywhere he went. Now, he feels he sees a lot less Red Storm gear around town. There are shirts with the words on them, but there’s not a definitive image attached to the Red Storm aside from the “SL” logo.