The Hays CISD board of trustees voted unanimously this evening to retire the Rebel mascot at Hays High School and to allow the district’s superintendent to oversee the selection of a replacement.
The only debate on the subject came when District 3 trustee Dr. Michael Sanchez argued the board should also be involved in choosing a new mascot, but none of the other trustees agreed with him.
“Hate is not our community,” said board president Esperanza Orosco, trying, mostly unsuccessfully, to keep her emotions in check as she made the motion to approve the mascot retirement, a motion seconded by vice president Will McManus.
The Rebel mascot will not disappear immediately and school trustee Vanessa Petrea said she hopes it will remain throughout the 2020-21 school year. What is more likely, however, is that students will be involved in some sort of mascot selection process, the results of which will be forwarded to Superintendent Dr. Eric Wright’s office and that new mascot will receive his blessing perhaps as early as the beginning of the next calendar year. Trustees did voice the opinion that they would prefer the mascot be animal, not human, in nature, saying a human mascot, such as Patriots or Cowboys, the two names that topped a recent on-line student poll, could also prove to be divisive.
“I am against the new mascot being a person,” Petrea said. “That could be deemed controversial in another 50 years. I would like to remain consistent with our two other high schools and pick an animal or an object that we can all rally behind. I think this change is overdue. I am very proud of the students and community members who stepped up and used the current shift in momentum to bring this important issue to the forefront.”
“It is past time for this change,” McManus said. “We don’t want to have 25 percent of our students at this or any of other campuses to feel intimidated or unwelcome by something as simple as a mascot.”
McManus, a graduate of Hays High School, said the Hays students who spoke to the board during the public comments section of the meeting “demonstrate for me the quality of the education they’re receiving at Hays and that’s what I want us to be known for.
“I am deeply saddened that our students were persecuted on-line for something as simple as advocating for change,” McManus said. “Honestly, it breaks my heart. And adults that may have been a part of that really need to spend some time reflecting on what matters to their life. I am really, honestly upset about it. If students want to battle one another over something, that’s fine. But any adults creating fake accounts to troll students on-line is not acceptable in this community.
“This is about the future and not the past,” he said. “Although I am part of that past, I want to help define the future and that’s why I fully support this change.”
Trustee Merideth Keller, a 10-year veteran on the school board, said she wished the mascot change had happened years earlier. She said the board banned the confederate flag at Hays in 2012 and in 2015 decided not to overrule a decision to change the school’s fight song from “Dixie.”
“I wish we had retired the rebel mascot back in 2015 and I am sorry that we did not,” Keller said. “Now we have an entire cohort of kids that have to suffer through this conversation again and the vitriol associated with it again. I apologize to those students and to the teachers and all of the staff because we didn’t handle it when we should have.
“Institutional racism is 100 percent real,” she continued. “And this body actually has the opportunity to do something about that. We need to dig deeper. We need to look at the people of color who are in trouble more than their counterparts who are white. We need to dig down into the data. We need to look at our policies and our procedures and our training and make sure that we are doing the best that we can to educate our kids. I want to learn more about how we’re dealing with institutional racism with our policies and our procedures. How are we keeping kids safe, healthy and in an inclusive environment.”
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