Lawyers Only Early Winners in Mascot Fight

By Layla Kalinen
Eagle Times Staff
CHESTER, VT — While the debate rages on and the legal fight may not be over, the Green Mountain Unified School District is done paying some fees in the fight over the district’s Chieftains mascot.

On Tuesday, Sept. 26, the district’s board voted 6-3 to stop paying for legal counsel in the fight that has already cost it about $10,000.

The “special” meeting opened with two residents questioning the board’s intention to call a meeting without Chair Deb Brown — who was unable to attend because of family commitments she had notified the board of in advance — and ended with several residents demanding the Chieftain name remain, despite the logo being done away with more than a year ago.

“It looks like there’s a personal agenda and to do it when the chair can’t be here just creates an optic that is not going to look good for anyone,” said Roy Spauling of Chester.

Stuart Lindberg of Cavendish spoke on preserving the name Chieftain, arguing that the name is neutral without the logo.

“I served on this board from 2014 to 2016, I graduated from Green Mountain High School in 1986 and have been a taxpayer in Cavendish,” he said. “When my education property tax is about $800; you don’t think that’s a whole lot of money until you add it to the thousands of dollars I’m already paying in taxes.”

Lindberg said regardless of the close to $10,000 in lawyers’ fees spent, the group challenging keeping the Chieftains mascot title was more at fault by forcing the hand of the school board to engage in legal channels. He also expressed concern that meetings should be called for matters about test scores and curriculum, not mascots.

The meeting was interrupted midway through as unknown party made overt racial slurs and aired explicit pornography via the meeting’s Zoom connection.

At the close of the meeting, Martha Mott of Cavendish noted the name controversy at Green Mountain High School isn’t new.

“My oldest child started school at GM almost 20 years ago in 2004, and my youngest graduated from Green Mountain in 2015. We spent over 10 years here with our kids as students and I was also active in the Booster club during that time. There were many times when the students could not get fully behind their mascot. Sometimes it was OK to wear a dress and paint their faces, while other times it was not,” Mott said. “That made it very challenging for the students. I’m not here to say whether you’re using Chieftains as the name is right or wrong. My point is that it’s been divisive for over 20 years.”

Mott also noted the financial cost of the ongoing argument regarding the Chieftain’s name.

“In addition, so much time, money and energy has been spent on something that has divided the school community. Therefore, I suggest that we retire the Chieftain name by having a ceremony honoring his service to the school for all these years, and then hand the baton over to the new mascot, the Mountain Lions,” she said.

Carrie Roy King, one of the four individuals who filed an official complaint with the state, spoke about the legal violations of keeping the name.

“You’ve heard from me over and over again. I think I’m well stated on record. I did want to just address a few things about the legal proceedings. First, I just wanted to revisit the fact that the violation actually happened when the school didn’t have their own mascot policy on Jan. 1, 2023, and that’s where the violation of the first,” King said. “Secondly, I just wanted to address because we keep talking about how the Chieftain is not always associated with native image imagery and stereotypes.

“I did just want to share that I did do some research, which I’ll share with all of you, into every chieftain in the United States. In a case through schools in the history of United States education, there have been 45 of them, and every single one of them has been Native themed, and every single one of them has been tied to negative stereotypes,” she said.