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Principal says new mascot will be ‘inclusive,’ ‘gender-neutral’
Clairemont High School in California is getting ready to replace its Chieftains mascot with a “gender-neutral” Captains symbol this fall.
The school’s decision adds to a growing list of education institutions that have rejected supposedly offensive mascots – from Ben Franklin to pioneers to Newfoundland dogs – for new ones over the past 12 months.
As The San Diego Union-Tribune reports, the San Diego Unified school board voted Tuesday to approve the Captains as Clairemont High’s new mascot.
“It represents leadership and inclusivity,” Trustee Sabrina Bazzo said, according to the report.
Principal Karly Johnstone also used the word “inclusive” in a news release describing the ways leaders are thinking about how to depict the new mascot.
“Captains was chosen largely for its inclusive application and being a title students can strive to attain,” Johnstone stated. “Though Captains is a human reference, we are looking for our mascot to be a gender-neutral animal or symbol which will represent the inclusive culture of Clairemont High School and we look forward to working this into our school culture.”
The decision has to do with a California law, slated to take effect in July, that prohibits public schools from using “derogatory Native American terms” as names or mascots.
These include “Apaches, Big Reds, Braves, Chiefs, Chieftains, Chippewa, Comanches, Indians, Savages, Squaw and Tribe,’” according to the law.
The high school will start using the new mascot next school year, according to the Union-Tribune:
Previous renaming efforts, Bazzo said Monday, were “a lot more rocky and not done as thoughtfully.” This process was much less contentious — something she attributed in part to its being driven by state law.
“People had different thoughts on it, and there was emotion around it,” she said. “But they really came together at the end of the day and did what was right for our school and our community.”
The new mascot will be put in place this fall for the 2026-27 school year.
The high school used the Chieftains mascot for 68 years, FOX 5 San Diego reports.
New York has a similar ban on Native American mascots in place for its public schools. However, a Native American group is suing to overturn it, calling it “the dumbest law of all time” and racial discrimination, the New York Post reports.
Meanwhile, other mascots on college campuses also are being replaced with symbols that are supposedly more “inclusive.”
In Oregon, Lewis & Clark College just unveiled its “confident and proud” River Otter mascot, replacing the Pioneer. On its website, the college said some people felt the Pioneer was “inextricably linked with settler colonialism.”
Notably, the college also rejected the Newfoundland, a breed of dog, as a replacement mascot due to concerns about “the erasure of Indigenous culture.”
A Pennsylvania college also is in the process of replacing its dual mascots fashioned after its namesakes Benjamin Franklin and U.S. Supreme Court Justice John Marshall.
A committee at Franklin & Marshall College is working to replace them with a new mascot “that is fun, gender-neutral, and full of personality—a character that sparks connection, excitement, and a sense of belonging,” The College Fix reported previously.
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