Forget the Raiders and forget the Ravens: The Rutland City School Board voted unanimously Tuesday night to make “Rutland” the team name for Rutland High School sports.
The vote was the culmination of more than two years of negotiations — and sometimes squabbling — among school board members, school officials and students.
The nickname had been Rutland Raiders for decades, but students pushed for a change because of the name’s racist connotations.
According to Greg Schillinger, Rutland High School principal, the board’s vote on Tuesday marked a desire by both its members and the greater school community to finally reach a decision on the mascot issue.
“The board has expressed an interest in bringing the discussion to a conclusion,” Schillinger said. “This was their effort to do so.”
The idea of referring to the school sports teams as simply “Rutland” came from a series of surveys Schillinger circulated to middle and high school students and faculty members.
Schillinger first provided an open-ended suggestion box for students and staff to offer name ideas. The school community then voted among the top four most suggested names. “Rutland” received 43% of the vote, “Raptors” 26%, “Ravens” 16% and “Red Wolves” 15%.
The motion approved on Tuesday, originally proposed by board member Stephanie Stoodley and amended by board member Sara Atkins-Doenges, stated that “Rutland” is an appropriate name under which the school can come together.
It also asked school administrators to return to the school board in June with specific imagery, or a mascot, representing what “Rutland” means to the school.
Some board members expressed concern about what the mascot would actually look like, and whether it is appropriate to have a nickname that is just the name of the school and the city where it’s located.
“My feeling is that if we don’t replace it with something, then people will continue calling us and calling our teams the Raiders,” board member Kevin Kiefaber said at a meeting Dec. 13, when discussion of the proposed new name began.
“I think that is a racist situation,” Kiefaber said. “ I don’t think doing that really addresses the issue.”
However, the board concluded that “Rutland” reflects a plurality of students’ wishes.
“At some point, we have to just move on from this issue for the best of our students,” Stoodley said at Tuesday night’s meeting. “This is taking way too much time for almost three years now. Enough is enough.”
Schillinger said he hopes to employ a process similar to selecting the moniker for choosing the imagery to represent it. He plans to consult the high school student council, a professional graphic designer, and an array of students before the board’s June deadline to propose a mascot image.
The board’s decision could be the end of a series of heated debates over the original “Rutland Raiders” mascot, beginning in October 2020 with a vote to retire the name and arrowhead logo over concerns about racism in the mascot’s origins.
In February 2021, the school board officially replaced “Raiders” with “Ravens.” Nearly a year later, though, in January 2022, and after elections had changed the makeup of the school board, a majority of board members voted to reinstate “Raiders,” arguing that the previous removal process had been flawed.
Then, at the beginning of the 2022-23 school year, the board voted once again to retire the “Raiders” mascot, citing its violation of a new state law that asks the state Agency of Education to create a “model nondiscriminatory school branding policy.”
While Schillinger acknowledged that referring to the school’s teams simply as “Rutland” might be unconventional, he argued that the decision shows the power of students’ voices, and their unique ways of thinking.
“The young people of the community are the future of the community,” Schillinger said at the meeting Dec. 13. “Yeah, this (name) is different; this is not like everybody else, and I like that. We are going to be different than everybody else — good.”