After more than eight decades, Bellingham High announces its new, inclusive mascot
With everyone itching for summer vacation, it’s time to meet Whatcom County’s newest school mascot — drum roll please — the Bellingham High School Bayhawks.
Bellingham Public Schools Superintendent Greg Baker made the announcement Friday afternoon, June 18, in an email, following the endorsement submitted one week earlier by the BHS Mascot Change Task Force.
“I also want to express my gratitude to those who served on the task force, participated in the surveys and advisory lessons, attended the forums or gave feedback other ways,” Baker wrote. “It was evident that the task force led a thorough, thoughtful and inclusive process.”
Baker went on to say to watch for the mascot design process.
“In the meantime, Go Bellingham Bayhawks!” he wrote.
Bayhawks won the task force’s recommendation over three other finalists presented to the community for consideration — Raptors (referring to dinosaurs), Raptors (referring to a bird of prey) and a collegiate letter B.
For the record, Bellingham will not be the first team known as the Bayhawks, though two professional teams are now defunct — the Erie (Pennsylvania) Bayhawks played in the NBA Development League and G League from 2008 to 2019 and the Chesapeake/Baltimore/Washington Bayhawks played professional lacrosse between 2001 and 2020. St. Dominic High School in Oyster Bay, New York, is also known as the Bayhawks.
The move for Bellingham High was made following the nationwide social justice movement that helped persuade the Washington Football Team to abandon an offensive mascot and other schools and teams at all levels to cast off insensitive names and logos.
From the year it opened in 1938, Bellingham High has been known as the Red Raiders, and until 1998, the school’s logo included a Native American image, according to the June 10 memorandum submitted to Baker by the task force.
The school was closed from 1998 to 2000 for a remodel and reopened with a new red-tailed hawk logo, but still the Red Raiders mascot. In 2013, an online petition was started to restore Bellingham’s original Native American logo, but it had only 65 supporters.
On Jan. 20, prior to the introduction of a Washington state measure that would bar public schools in the state from using Native American names, symbols and images as their school mascots, team names or logos, Bellingham High announced it was forming the task force to examine options to move on from Red Raiders.
In May, families, alumni and others with past, current or future ties to Bellingham High were given four choices to be the next Bellingham High mascot.
A series of student and community surveys all concluded Bayhawks was the way to go, the task force’s memo stated, and it made that recommendation to Baker.
The task force also recommended the Bayhawks will need a new image and that student leaders should help “generate energy and excitement for the name change as well as providing options for students to select images.”
