Nicole Higgins DeSmet

Free Press Staff Writer

SOUTH BURLINGTON - The Rebel team name has been dropped after a unanimous vote by the South Burlington School Board.

“It’s the best decision, the right decision for our schools,” Superintendent David Young said as he gave his recommendation to the Board on Wednesday to drop the Rebel team name.

“This is not the time to hesitate when it comes to inclusion,” Young continued, echoing the words of former state Senator Jim Leddy, who criticized the board last year for the length of time they were taking on the issue.

About two hundred community members for and against changing South Burlington High School's team name of Rebels packed the gym of the Rick Marcotte Central School on Wednesday night. Unlike the commentary on social media boards leading up to the decision the gathering was respectful. People used applause to support speakers, though one group of three students stood and held blown up photographs of Confederate imagery from the pages of 1960s year books when a speaker said the name Rebel has nothing to do with racism in its current use at the school.



The mascot debate began in August 2015, when a teacher at a School Board meeting spoke about the Rebel's association with the Confederacy when it was chosen in the 1960s. The concern was raised after Dylann Roof murdered nine people attending a historic black church in Charleston, S.C. Roof was seen with a Confederate flag on a white supremacist website.

Some residents and students wanted to sever any connection to the confederacy, while others saw no harm in the name, which they say has come to mean other things over the years since the mascot was dropped.

Interim Principal Pat Phillips read a message from Principal Patrick Burke, who is currently on leave due to illness, which addressed both sides and his own change of heart regarding the name.

"Students and staff on all sides of this issue continue to be uncomfortable expressing their views. For that fact alone is the major reason why I support Mr. Young in his recommendation to embrace a new direction," Phillips said on behalf of Burke. "We need to change because something that exists to unify us continues to divide us."

One by one board members gave opinions, largely expressing how their own education in bias evolved over the past year and listening to students changed how they viewed the nickname.

School Board student representative Isaiah Hines, who repeatedly addressed the board this school year with a group called the Student Diversity Union, also gave his opinion — a modified version of the speech he had given earlier in the school year. He, along with other union members, insisted the Rebel name should be retired and asked the board and superintendent to follow through on actions promised in October 2015.

This time his words got a standing ovation from the crowd.

Board Member Elizabeth Fitzgerald summed up much of the sentiment from the board. She hoped students and community members would "honor our respective collective personal history and unite to engage others in honesty and humility and kindness."

But there were students, particularly the varsity cheerleading squad, who strongly resisted changing the name.

"There is no relevance to the name and hasn’t for decades," Co-captain Amy Lafferty said of the Rebel team name being disconnected from its history in the 1990s.

The change is to take effect in August 2017. Superintendent Young said that the next step is engaging the students on how exactly to do that.

Contact Nicole Higgins DeSmet at ndesmet@freepressmedia.com or 802-660-1845. Follow her on Twitter @NicoleHDeSmet.