Mascot, colors picked for new high school

KNIK — It isn’t a unique choice for a mascot, but it certainly seems a fitting selection.

After surveying the district, Mat-Su Borough School District officials announced at a meeting Thursday that the mascot for the soon-to-be-built Joe Redington Sr. Jr./Sr. High School will be the Husky.

“We think it’s definitely an appropriate mascot name for the school,” assistant superintendent Gene Stone said.

And certainly not out of place amidst the Knights, Moose, Rams, Warriors and Hawks that are the symbols of the Valley’s other neighborhood high schools.

Also, the school’s colors will be the same as the Seattle Seahawks — navy blue and green, Stone said.

He told parents and neighbors assembled in the gymnasium at Goose Bay Elementary that the new school will ramp up gradually. Sixth-, seventh-, eighth- and ninth-graders will go there and possibly 10th-graders. The final determination will wait until the district has a better picture what kind of demand there is for the school.

“Some folks are going to have to make some choices,” Stone said.

Such as whether family’s decide to stay with Wasilla Middle School or Wasilla High School or make the switch to Redington.

Then, Stone said, as the highest class graduates, the district will add another class for them to move into.

The district plans to build a second identical school on the same property. When that’s complete — around 2020 — high school students will move from the old building into the new, converting the old building into a middle school.

So far the district only has funding for one school, which is scheduled to be open for the start of school in fall 2015.

Project manager Bob Becthold said the borough intends to build an elementary school it also has funding for on an adjacent property. Most of the grumbling in the crowd had to do with the site for the schools. The land, the borough admits, is very swampy.

“It is a very difficult site,” said Gary Wolf of Wolf Architecture, the architect for the building. “We are working through it.”

There was also some talk about the art that will eventually be installed in the school. Given that the state mandates the borough spend 1 percent of the project’s costs on art, this project will have $500,000 worth of art, Bechtold said.

Parents brought up controversial Valley public art installations, including the piece at Wasilla High that was briefly covered with a tarp after its installation.

“One of the things that we really learned is to stay away from these interpretive pieces,” Stone said.

Bechtold said the borough has installed art for years and has done some beautiful things with those funds. Such controversies are rare, he said.

“We remember the losses and not the victories, and there were lots of victories,” he said.

Contact Andrew Wellner at 352-2270 or andrew.wellner@frontiersman.com.