The White River Valley Herald

Superintendent Elects To Swap RU Logo

Ghost Mural Stoked Racist Symbolism


RU’s 1981 yearbook shows an earlier rendition of the Galloping Ghost.

RU’s 1981 yearbook shows an earlier rendition of the Galloping Ghost.

After a year and a half of staff, students, and community members discussing similarities between some images of the Randolph Union High School “Galloping Ghost” mascot and an image of a Ku Klux Klan rider—and whether such a resemblance merits finding a new mascot—Superintendent Layne Millington stepped into the debate with a decision this week.

In a Monday morning email to the OSSD mailing list, Millington announced that he’s decided the district will retain the Galloping Ghost as its mascot, but will use one image to represent it—that of a skeleton riding a horse in a cloak, rather than a depiction of a figure in a sheet or hood. Additionally, the large Galloping Ghost mural in the high school gym will be removed this weekend, Millington said. While the school district will distribute a photograph of the mural to anyone who requests it, Millington believes it’s important to remove any images of the school mascot that even slightly resemble a 1980s rendition, which appears on some athletic banners, that looked like it could be wearing a KKK hood and robe.

Additionally, school district staff are investigating the cost of replacing several clocks around the high school that have the mural’s image on them.

Stepping In

Randolph boys basketball wins the tip-off of a home game as a Galloping Ghost mural looks down from the wall. (Herald File / Tim Calabro)

Millington told The Herald that although he’d made the decision about the logo and the mural a while ago he wanted to wait to announce it until the timing was less “off the cuff,” he said.

Prompting Millington’s announcement, was his discovery of a February 16 post from Kate Mayer asking for people to submit to Millington their opinions of a letter signed by 23 OSSD staff and faculty, calling for the removal of the mural in the high school and asking for a new school mascot.

Mayer included the text of the teachers’ letter in the post, which appeared in a Facebook group called “You know you are from Randolph when….”

According to Millington, Mayer is an RUHS graduate and worked for the district before Millington was hired. Mayer did not respond to a request for comment from The Herald.

The post had more than 160 comments, many expressing strong opposition to changing the mascot, before the post’s apparent removal.

During its online presence, Mayer’s post sparked a heated enough debate that Millington felt it was time for him to announce his decision with the aim to stop the conversation before it caused more division in the community.

Citing debates in districts such as South Burlington, which went through a highly controversial process of changing its mascot in 2017 and 2018, culminating in the involvement of the Vermont Supreme Court, Millington said he wanted to avoid, as much as possible, fueling such divides in within the OSSD community.

“I’ve watched this unfold in a lot of places, it never goes well,” said Millington. “All the big conversations tend to do is get both sides more dug in, and then somebody just ends up having to step in and make a decision anyway … so rather than let the anger and vehemence build, it’s easier just to step in now and make a decision.

“I also worry that … things get ugly enough, I don’t want violence happening. When people take strong stands in an environment like this, and [are] not listening to each other … it has the potential,” said Millington. “I don’t believe [violence is] actually going to happen, but I’ve always got that little flag in the back of my head.”

Teachers’ Letter

RUHS teacher Tevye Kelman said he wrote the letter on February 12 “after some disturbing data about the racial climate at our school was shared during a staff meeting.”

Kelman initially distributed the letter to a small group of OSSD faculty, and on February 16 sent it out the entire district’s faculty, but had not yet shared it with administrators.

Kelman, who learned that the letter had been posted to Facebook Monday morning, emphasized that it was not intended to be made available to the larger public, but rather he intended to present it to administrators once his colleagues had a chance to sign it.

Kelman said he felt that taking their concerns to the broader public wouldn’t have been safe for the kids who have been experiencing racist bullying within the school.

“We understand that probably in a community where people of color are such a minority there’s never going to be a majority of people who agree on how this symbol makes them feel. But I think our point … is that if it’s an issue of the impact of the symbol [doing] harm to some kids, even if it does not do harm to the rest of the kids, that’s still unacceptable,” he said.

Kelman said that he feels the staff and faculty’s work is far from over when it comes to improving the racial climate, and making sure all students feel safe (whether they feel unsafe due to racism or anything else). While he agrees with Millington’s decision to take down the mural, he said it’s too soon to for him to weigh in on whether reverting back to the pre- 1980s image of the Galloping Ghost will be enough to quell the similarities between the mascot and the KKK.

Randolph Elementary teacher Nora Skolnick, who was among the 23 signatories of the letter, said she feels the result of Millington’s decision is a little more clear cut.

“I think that it solves the problem,” Skolnick said. “We can all have our opinion on whether we like [the new] image, but whether you like it or not, it’s not a racist image,” she posited, “it doesn’t resemble someone from the KKK.”

Moving On?

Although Kelman said he’s heard people discussing the similarities between the RUHS mascot imagery and images of Klansmen as long as he worked in the district— over a decade, the subject became more broadly discussed in 2018.

That summer, RUHS Principal Elijah Hawkes received an email from Curtiss Reed Jr., the executive director of Vermont Partnership for Fairness and Diversity, in which he compared the RUHS mural with a still from the 1915 movie “Birth of a Nation,” which was credited with a nationwide resurgence in the KKK, at the time of its release.

At the full school assembly that August, Hawkes shared the two images from the email, as well as the history of the mascot—noting that the two have different origins.

Hawkes encouraged a community dialogue around the perceived similarities between the two.

At an alumni event last summer, Millington spent some time examining yearbooks and noticed that the image of a cloaked skeleton appeared repeatedly (and solely) in the yearbooks up until sometime in the 1980s.

At that point, the school’s logo switched to the image of the hooded horse rider, and has changed many times in the years since then, Millington said.

Ultimately, Millington hopes his decision to begin using the older depiction and remove the mural puts an end to the debate about the mascot.

“I think the important message to the community is that of all the things we can spend our time on, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. We’re worried about the performance of the students, we’re worried about them being able to walk out of here with the best education we can provide, and I would rather at this point be spending our time on that,” he said.