One last try for mascot choice

Students will cast final votes

Kalispell school trustees will try one more time to come up with a politically correct mascot for the new Glacier High School.

But - with the students themselves casting the final vote - this should be the last time.

After a month of coming under fire for a committee's recommendation to go with the Wolfpack, the board split nearly in half last week to back the pack.

Because of trustees' own deep division, they postponed a formal vote and sent it back to committee.

At Tuesday night's school board work session, Superintendent Darlene Schottle laid out her plan for revamping the process.

Schottle chairs the mascot-naming committee composed of one student from Kalispell's seventh through 10th grades, parents from Evergreen, Russell and Edgerton schools, and Flathead activities director Mark Dennehy.

She has invited each of the committee's current members to meet one more time to hash over the top dozen or more suggestions gathered in a community input process.

If she does not hear back from those members, she will fill their seats with others from the represented groups.

The committee will reconsider the top suggestions and decide on a final three.

Those three mascot ideas will come back to the trustees, who will be asked for their blessing or redirection.

Once trustees have decided on the three they could live with, the decision will be turned over to students from the schools within Glacier High's boundaries.

Those schools include West Valley, Helena Flats, Evergreen and Olney/Bissell schools, and Kalispell's Russell and Edgerton elementary schools. Kalispell students from Linderman and the junior high will be split between Flathead High and Glacier High, based on where they live.

All current students at Linderman and the junior high will be in on the vote.

The students' choice will become the committee's final recommendation to the school board, which still will cast the official vote to put the mascot into play.

"This should be fun for the kids," Schottle said, "and it should gain support from the kids and their families."

But, trustees asked each other, what if the final pick once again is the Wolfpack?

Because its connotation is both "revered and reviled," as Board Chairman Don Murray put it last week, the board once again could be deeply split.

Trustees emphatically agreed that will not happen. If their initial vote brings that result, trustee Mark Lalum proposed, they will recall the vote and put out another motion declaring it a unanimous decision.

Reporter Nancy Kimball can be reached at 758-4483 or by e-mail at nkimball@dailyinterlake.com