Highland updates mascot, mission statement

RIVERSIDE — Highland schools are starting off the school year with a new mascot illustration, as well as a revised mission statement from the school board. The district still is represented by a husky, but the art has changed.

"We had a lot of different husky heads around,“ Superintendent Ken Crawford said. ”If we’re going to put this on a letterhead, we had no clear cut, ‘This is what we do.’ We have the ‘H,’ but we really didn’t have a husky head.“

Moving forward, the district is asking anyone involved at the school with making a shirt, printing flyers, or representing the district in any way, to use the new husky head.

“We want consistency in that, and the pride that comes with that,” Crawford said. “In our gym I’ve counted three different husky heads … that makes no sense to me. We need to market ourselves, align ourselves.”

Crawford said school officials hoped this year to carve out an identity of what a Highland Husky looks like.

“We feel like the culture of our building, culture of our community … it’s how we get kids to say, ‘This is Highland, we are Highland,” he said. “That’s having a mission statement, that’s having a logo that’s all put together … saying, ‘This is what it means to be a Husky.”

Along the same tracks, the Highland school board has adopted a new mission statement. Where the previous guiding principle was “to provide all students the opportunity to acquire the necessary skills to fulfill their potential and become positive contributors to society,” the new statement seeks to be more broad.

After some drafting, the school board settled on its new statement, which says the district “supports all learners in pursuing continuous learning in a culturally responsive, academic environment.”

Crawford said the new mindset covered more people.

“We’re not saying just that we want students to be lifelong learners, but we want our teachers and the adults to be learners,” he said. “We want everybody to be involved in that … and we want to be culturally respondent. A lot of things are changing out there, and we want them to be ready to react to so many different environments.”

To achieve that goal, School Counselor Peggy Schwab is working on an approach the district calls SPIRIT, an acronym for “Service, Personal responsibility, Integrity, Respect, Impact and Tenacity.”

Schwab said the initiative would help students build not only the skills, but the confidence to meet the challenges of entering the workforce after school.

“One of my main goals is to make sure that all of our students are prepared for life after high school,” she said. “That goes beyond reading and math and science, and it goes into this SPIRIT thing where we’re helping our students develop socially, emotionally. We’re looking at their career development and their individual growth.”

While teachers and school board members were highly involved in the goal-shaping changes, Schwab said kids had a hand in it as well.

“Part of the reason we were working on this last year is because we spent a lot of time talking with the students and asking them what kind of school they wanted.” she said. “They want a school that creates a safe environment, and that they can grow in and be part of things.”

The mindset shift has been in the works for a while. Crawford said it was motivated by social and emotional learning issues highlighted early in the pandemic.

“We saw a need for some emotional support,” he said. “When we talk about our culture, it starts right there. What do we believe in? What do we want to see in them? What do we do to help them?”

Comments: Kalen.McCain@southeastiowaunion.com