The Board of Education voted on the motion “to respectfully retire the Redskin mascot effective immediately with phased out completion by the end of June 2024”. This provides staff and administration time to work deliberately to establish the process by which the next Camden Frontier mascot will be selected. The process will include input from students, staff, administration, governance board and the community. Once the process is finalized it will be made public through our website.

 

    This has been an unavoidable topic for years for our school district as well as many other districts and organizations. In 2005 the National Collegiate Athletic Association adopted a new policy to prohibit NCAA colleges and universities from displaying hostile and abusive racial/ethnic/national origin mascots, nicknames or imagery at any of the 88 NCAA championships. Schools were given a period of time to phase out the imagery depicting Native Americans or Native American Cultural references deemed offensive. We are allotting for a similar period of phase out as well.

 

    With large organizations like the NCAA impressing upon their members schools to self-evaluate their Native American referenced mascots and the Washington Football Club’s 2020 decision to remove Redskins as their mascot/logo it was only a matter of time before the trickle-down effect infiltrated local school districts. The passion, memory, and sentiments of alumni is not to be forgotten nor will artifacts be thrown away. We will be preserving the history of the Camden Frontier School District. The retirement of the mascot is about looking to the future, not erasing the past.

 

--

Chris Adams

Superintendent

Camden-Frontier Schools