BY NEIL ZOLOT
WAKEFIELD – Finally, the High School has a new logo. The School Committee chose the Circle W option over the Shield W one at their meeting last night. The vote was 6-0, with member Kevin Piskadlo absent. “We’re over 2 ½ years into this process and hopefully winding down,” member Tom Markham said before the vote.
The Circle W is a double circle reading Wakefield Warriors around a recognizable corporate logo style W, with negative space that could be used for various balls or activity symbols. The Shield W had a different W inside a shield. Both were conceived by art teacher and graphic designer Morgan Giannotti and were presented to the School Committee June 27, along with two others that had part of the W as a lightning bolt. The four options were conceived after a logo similar to that of Ohio State University was deemed to be a copyright infringement with any legal fight considered unwinnable last year.
Other options considered at one time or another to replace the traditional Indian warrior logo were one using a symbol of the town, its bandstand/gazebo, inside a shield and one using a star and an eagle created by the now defunct Logo Committee member Elena Corradino.
Technically, the School Committee vote was approval of a recommendation by Superintendent Doug Lyons, which he based, in part, on the results of a student survey that favored the Circle W. Despite the school year having ended, 323 students, including 42 who just graduated, responded to a survey conducted through social media and email. 178 favored the Circle W, 145 the Shield W. “We wanted to give the community every opportunity to weigh in,” he said. “The feedback we got was the Circle W was preferred.”
It was also the preference of 60% of 562 8-12 graders in a student poll on the last day of school, although the Shield W was not an option at that time. “The School Committee always intended student voices be a part of this,” Markham noted.
In discussion, member Peter Davis wondered if Giannotti might be asked to refine the design. Lyons told him School Committees generally do not micromanage such matters, but said Giannotti, currently on vacation, should be invited to a future meeting to be recognized for her work. He also suggested adoption and variations of the logo for different teams and clubs and use on clothing of various colors be handled at the subcommittee level.
School Committee chair Amy Leeman said she preferred the Shield W, but still voted to approve Lyons’ recommendation.
In other discussion, the subject of school on Good Friday, March 29, 2024 came up. It is scheduled as a school day, as it was on April 7 this year. Lyons suggested the matter be studied, in light of low attendance in 2023. “It needs to be put to the administrative team to think through,” he said.
Leeman noted it could be considered a “low attendance” day, while relating the School Committee voted to remove Good Friday as an off-day in March 2019. It was a moot point in 2020 because school was closed due to the pandemic. The hybrid class schedule in 2021 also rendered the attendance issue moot.
A quirk in the 2022 calendar put Good Friday, April 15, as the day before a vacation. Whether the low attendance was a result of people trying to stretch out plans for trips, with teachers using the day as one of the days they are granted for religious reasons, is anyone’s guess.
Davis asked Lyons how all the teacher absences are covered. Lyons told him in addition to substitute teachers, regular teachers are used to cover classes, but many kids call their parents to be dismissed in the middle of the day.
Davis would like to see the day be a special, unconventional school day that might attract students. “Something has to change here,” he feels. “I encourage us to do something. Let’s see if it changes the trajectory of the day.”
“We have to come up with creative solutions so we’re not warehousing kids in the cafeteria,” member Kevin Fontanella added, prompting Lyons to ask the term warehousing not be used.
Markham noted Good Friday and other religious days were removed as off-days “to get us out of recognizing religious holidays.”
He feels using Good Friday as an unconventional activity day still recognizes it as a religious holiday. “That concerns me,” he said. “We shouldn’t have any day be different from the others.”