Cullowhee Valley School chooses new mascot
Henceforth, Cullowhee Valley School in Jackson County will be represented as the Cullowhee Valley Wolves.
Interim Superintendent Dr. Tony Tipton announced the official mascot decision at the May 25 school board meeting.
“I believe ‘the wolves’ is something the school, the students, the athletes can have fun with,” said Tipton.
For several weeks throughout the second half of the school year, suggestion boxes were set up in various locations around the school where students could drop in mascot ideas. Several of the mascot ideas were duplicates, but by the end of the suggestion period there were 42 unique mascot ideas. All the students at CVS voted on the list of 42, and the ideas were narrowed down to the top six mascot choices. Students then got a chance to vote from the top six choices, from which ‘Wolves’ was most popular.
“The exciting thing about it is that now we can take that and develop some new rituals around it, and become the wolves,” said CVS Principal Katherine Kantz. “I’m excited about the things that we’ll be able to do with it, finding the right visual representation and then the different things that we will do. For example, I’m really thinking that we get a great wolf howl and at the beginning of each basketball game or other games that we push the button and we howl.”
Not only was the wolf mascot the top vote getter, it won both subgroups of the school as well. Students in grades K-2 and 3-8 both voted for the wolf mascot out of the last six choices.
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“It’s important to note that no adults honed in on this at all, adults could turn in the ideas when we first collected the ideas, but only students were allowed to vote, not even the teachers,” said Kantz. “They needed to be the ones who would feel good about being represented by it.”
Cullowhee Valley School was charged with determining a new mascot after the old mascot, the rebel, was officially retired in January of this year. CVS had used the Rebel mascot since 1958. In 1994, when Camp Lab school closed and Cullowhee Valley School opened, there was some discussion within the community about changing the mascot, but ultimately, CVS remained the Rebels.
Over the past two years, CVS graduates in Jackson County, and around the country, wrote letters to school board members and started a petition to engage the Jackson County community. They also undertook fundraising efforts to assist in enacting new signage and renovations if the school board chose to change the mascot.
The new mascot will take effect this fall, when students return from summer vacation, or an extended summer school.
