by SARAH THOMACK
St. Joseph Post
After months of conversations and public comment during school board meetings, the Savannah R3 School District Board of Education has decided to create a committee to address its mascot.
Savannah R3 Communications Coordinator Jess Gillett says in July, community members brought up concerns about the school's mascot, the Savages.
"We had an enormous amount of people show up at our board meeting on both sides of the mascot issue, either wanting to keep it for tradition's sake or lots of nostalgic reasons or those who felt like we should change it," Gillett tells St. Joseph Post. "So the board decided that the best thing to do at this point would be to form a committee."
Gillett says the committee will be made up of community members both for and against a change.
"They will research the Savage mascot, its history, its origins, what a change would mean financially, where that money would come from. They really will just do a lot of the leg work with researching the call to change."
Savannah community members can find the application to be on the committee on the school district's website. Gillett says the board is going through an application process due to the amount of people that have been at meetings to address the mascot issue.
"Really the point of the application is for us to kind of rein in that to a manageable number, definitely not so that we can weed out people we don't want on the committee, that's not the case at all, I know I've seen a little bit of that going around social media," Gillett says. "We just want to make sure that we're getting people who really are committed to the cause and understand the commitment of it and have something to bring to the table."
Gillett says in just 24 hours of the application being on their website, at least 25 people had already applied to be on the committee.
Applications are due by November 1st and school board members will select committee members before its regular meeting on the 10th.