Outfoxing tradition: Belmont High students unite school with new mascot

BELMONT — Student members of Belmont Representatives Advocating for Student Success achieved their goal of changing Belmont High School's mascot from a Native American head to a fiery red fox this month, while retaining its iconic Red Raiders name. The change occurred after more than three and a half years of planning, democracy, debate, design and multiple school board meetings.

"They were very resilient, very strong and very mature," Principal Matthew Finch said of the BRASS members. "I couldn't be happier with the way they took the process."

That process began in summer 2021. For senior and BRASS member Tanner McKim, it marked the end of his first year in high school.

"This was introduced to us through student council; [they] had the question of creating a school store, and they weren't sure what mascot to use, because our former mascot, the Indian head Red Raider, wasn't received very well by everybody" McKim recalled. "So BRASS connected with student council, and we said, 'We need to find something that can unify and represent the school.'"

"Our big goal was to make student life better and to make the school system better by giving student input," said fellow senior and BRASS member Kim McWhinnie.

BRASS was still in its infancy, and the members had no idea just how much work a mascot change would take. The project became the core focus of the group throughout McKim's high school career. Due to the previous mascot's longstanding controversy, it was rarely seen or used.

As a result, BRASS's early efforts on the project didn't attract much student engagement.

"At the very beginning, they didn't really know why we were so focused on doing this, but when more of us as student leaders talked to them, and said, 'Hey, here's why we want to do it, because we want to have these pep rallies, have it at games, we want to do all these things,' I feel the student body came to more of an understanding," said BRASS member Emilie DeFrancesco. "I remember the last assembly when we pitched this final mascot of the fox idea, everyone was at first like, 'Oh, a fox?' Then we showed them some concept images, and everyone seemed really excited and actually talked about it for the next few days."

Getting to that level of reception was no easy task. BRASS members saw arguments from students, alumni and Belmont citizens alike when word got out about their efforts.

"This wasn't without backlash from all angles," said BRASS member Baidyn Lewis. "I remember when we had these meetings on Google Meet, and we're just getting harassed by the public and people in the school that were not happy about it."

Things got worse when the argument reached a wider audience on Facebook.

"We had a Belmont community page," Lewis recalled. "Someone had done a Google form for a class completely unrelated to what we were doing, and it asked, 'Would you be OK with a mascot change?' That got blown so out of proportion on the community page, and we were like, this is clear evidence that something needs to change."

Many BRASS members weren't very surprised at the level of arguing they saw once the news reached Facebook.

"I was in that class that gave out that survey, and it was just an experimental thing, just a project to involve the general public and gather information, and it just caught on fire," member Richard Johnson said. "After that, BRASS saw this is an issue, and the mascot had been controversial for a long time. There's been lots of pushes to change it in the past."

Previous attempts to change the Red Raiders' old-world image had failed. Student Cate McDonald chalked up BRASS's success to a more unifying approach toward the student body.

"We're not trying to talk about good and bad people, we're just saying unity and representation, those are the themes we kept coming back to. That's something everyone can recognize," McDonald said. "Whether or not you agreed that the mascot needed to be changed, you could see that it wasn't unifying our school."

The group went beyond a simple vote among the student body to enact their change. BRASS participated in local government on multiple occasions.

"The school board played a very important role in this because they're the governing body that allowed us to change it," McDonald said. "They recognized how important it was to us as a student group. I think that made a big difference that it was a group of students presenting this, that we had done all the research, we involved the student body in as many possible ways that we could."

After surveying the student body, BRASS narrowed their new mascot idea down to three: a pirate theme, a badger theme and a bull theme.

"The badger had a unique position, where we could choose to stay with the Red Raider name or change the Red Raider name, we had the pirates, which was just going to change the image, and the bulls, which is a completely new identity," McKim said.

For a while, it looked like the pirate mascot was going to win. BRASS took the image to the school board, who said they liked the pirate but would have liked to have been presented another option.

"They did say that this was on the table," McKim recalled. "The only thing they voted on at that meeting was to keep the name Red Raiders."

BRASS also had to have a public forum, according to McWhinnie, but no one attended, despite all the previous Facebook warfare.

When BRASS went back to the drawing board for another option, the idea of a red fox popped up. "There's a lot of foxes around the area, it is more representative than a pirate, a badger or a bull," McKim said. "Foxes can be very fierce, so from there we started to get different image options."

The group settled on the fox idea and started taking art submissions from students and staff alike. After picking their favorite, a finalized image was crafted by a professional graphic designer.

"I'm incredibly proud of them," said Finch, calling the ordeal a three-and-a-half-year lesson. "The process was the lesson, the product was not the lesson. The recognition that first attempts are often times not the direction things are going. Going back to the drawing board, being flexible. Their capacity to listen to understand and take other perspectives was very mature."