BELLEFONTE — What is a Bellefonte Raider? That is a question before the Bellefonte Area School District.
After voting to drop the word “Red” before “Raiders” and removing any Native American imagery associated with the school mascot and nickname in April, BASD is now grappling with how to rebrand moving forward.
So far, potential options include the “Iron Raiders,” or depictions of raiders as knights or hawks. Those ideas came after months of work by the Logo/Mascot Rebranding Committee, and were presented to the school board by district Superintendent Tammie Burnaford on Nov. 3.
The discussion came during a time of transition.
The day before, two new members were elected to the board, and in turn, board President Jon Guizar asked the board to take a “strategic pause” on the hot-button issue to allow for the community to digest the new information and allow some time for feedback.
The Logo/Mascot Rebranding Committee includes about 30 representatives from the student body, community, teachers and administration.
The goal of the committee is to get information from the public on a graphical representation of the nickname that is not centered on any one group’s race, ethnicity, or nation of origin.
The committee was tasked with bringing the recommendation to the board by the first meeting in November.
Before going through the options, Burnaford said the committee felt the block letter “B,” which the school currently uses as a logo, should continue to be used, along with whatever option is used for the new logo imagery.
“We talked about how we could make that block be trademarked, because ultimately, that is what we want to do, we want to trademark our images,” said Burnaford.
Included with the presentation were generic sample graphic images that the committee included as way to visualize potential imagery to go with the options, but were not to be considered recommendations or endorsements.
Here is a closer look at the top three recommendations:
The Iron Raider is meant to symbolize the iron ore that miners “raided from the ground” locally and highlight Bellefonte’s early iron ore mining history. In this option, the imagery would include miners and/or pick axes. Burnaford said an axe could be used as the “‘t” in the spelling of Bellefonte.
“If somewhere down the road this image would become more lifelike or humanlike, perhaps a human mascot at a game or whatever, we would cover the face so that it is gender-neutral because in the motion we can’t have one gender more than the other,” said Burnaford.
RAIDER AS A KNIGHT
The second option includes knight imagery in reference to the term Raiders. The relevance of the term is that knights would raid their opponents or raid the town of their opponents. The block letter “B,” or the school crest, could be included on a shield.
This option does not have any local ties, but like the first option — Iron Raider — the knight would need to remain gender-neutral.
“We talked a lot about this one. There were some famous knights in history who were women, but we would keep it gender-neutral,” said Burnaford.
RAIDER AS A HAWK
Burnaford said a hawk option could potentially be holding the block B in its talons. With hawks being plentiful in the area, Burnaford said that the term has local significance. Hawks “raid the nest of its prey.”
“They discussed whether it should be a red-tailed hawk. We decided that we are not suggesting that we be called the hawks because we are still the Raiders. The same goes with the knights. We are still the Raiders. The question is what symbol, moniker, or nickname do we want to be a symbol of the Bellefonte school district,” said Burnaford.
MOVING FORWARD
Even after the motion to change the name and remove the imagery last spring, the issue remains a divisive one in the community.
Burnaford said a video about the potential options with a poll was sent to middle school and high school students to “see where the kids heads were at.”
That poll “divided the student body again … more at the high school than in the middle school,” she said. “We had a number of high school students who wouldn’t complete the survey or didn’t want to complete the survey, which was fine.”
Only about a third of the high school students responded, while two-thirds of the middle school students gave their opinions, she said.
“From the very beginning, going back to April and May, I had some concerns about the divide in the student body. We have a long way to go,” said Burnaford.
“If this is the direction we are moving, we need to really bring the students along with us and bring the community along with us and work through that.”
Board member Mark Badger suggested that the board continue moving forward after all the effort that was put in by the committee. “We need to keep some solid momentum moving forward to bring this to some resolution,” he said.
Guizar said that in order to bring the community along together on the issue, more time must be taken.
“I think everyone nationwide has had enough of everyone telling us what we are going to do next in the form of mandates and other things. And I think that is the way this was perceived. I resisted it for a long time, trying to make that point and I think we see the result of what happens when we go about things like that. I am all about the branding committee. I think there are some great ideas,” said Guizar. He added, “We have our whole community stalled over this issue, and I don’t think we should push it forward for the sake of pushing it forward.”
In the end, no action was taken on the issue. The committee may add an artistic piece to go with the options so the public might have a better idea of what the imagery might look like. Multiple board members suggested having a future work session to discuss the matter further, after the public has had some time to consider some of the recommendations.
“My hope moving forward is that this is not an all-consuming topic for this board; we have more pressing issues than something that has been around for eighty years. And I am not minimizing it, but we really have got to get centered and refocused as a board and talk about some big topics that are coming up in the next year or two,” said Guizar.
