Eight years after the Scarborough School Board elected to change the high school’s nickname from Redskins to Red Storm, there is some discussion about reverting back to the original name.

Several local residents have sponsored a petition drive to put a question on the November ballot asking Scarborough voters if they want to bring back the school’s traditional name of Redskins.

But, even if the drive to put the question on the ballot is successful, the final decision regarding the school’s nickname rests with the school committee, not the voters. “We have not seen anything in the statute that would allow a community to have a legal determination of what the name should be,” said Scarborough Assistant School Superintendent Andrew Dolloff, who added that he had not seen the petition regarding the name change. “It would be the school board that would vote to change the name again.”

Dolloff added that there is no item currently on the school board’s agenda regarding any potential name change. “I haven’t heard any movement coming from an official level regarding a name change,” he said.

Scarborough High School’s teams have been known as the Red Storm since the board voted to change the name in 2000 in response to concerns that the name was offensive to Native Americans.

Currently, seven high schools in Maine still use nicknames with connotations to Native Americans, according to the New England Anti-Mascot Coalition. Those schools are Sanford (Redskins), Wells (Warriors), Nokomis Regional High School in Newport (Warriors), Skowhegan Area High School (Indians), Southern Aroostook Community School (Warriors) and Wiscasset (Redskins).

Dolloff was the Scarborough athletic director when the school board began to consider the name change, and he said that the process to change the name began early in the 2000-2001 school year when the board voted to discontinue the Redskins nickname.

During the year, Dolloff said the high school students voted on new names for the school’s teams and Titans came out at the top of the list. However, Dolloff said that the school board rejected that choice, partly out of concerns that the students chose Titans due to the success of the movie “Remember the Titans,” which was a hit that year and also because some school board members were concerned with the image of the titans, since according to Greek mythology, Kronos, the king of the titans, swallowed his children whole to keep them from overthrowing him.

After the school board rejected the choice of Titans as a school nickname, Dolloff said the students held a second vote, and Red Storm was the top choice.

Now, eight years after the change, Dolloff said that it would be expensive to revert back to the old nickname, and that’s before any potential lawsuits from groups claiming the name is offensive. On the practical side, Dolloff said if the name were to be changed, that would require that the school change all of the teams’ uniforms and signage at the athletic fields and gymnasiums. “All of our uniforms and everything that now goes with our athletic department now says Red Storm,” he said. “There would be a cost to making a change.”

Dolloff added that there wasn’t as large of a cost when the school went from Redskins to Red Storm, because the school had already started to phase out the name by ordering uniforms that read “Scarborough” instead of “Redskins” and using a block “S” instead of a Redskin logo. By doing this, there was a lot fewer things that needed to be changed when the nickname change became official, he said.

While he said it was important to have a nickname that wasn’t offensive, Dolloff said he didn’t think the choice of a mascot affected the students and fans. “There’s great school spirit no matter what our mascot is,” he said.

Besides, Dolloff said that an entire generation of students have grown up with the Red Storm nickname. “We’ve been the Red Storm for eight years,” he said. “These students have identified with that, they’ve embraced it. If we change now, we’d be changing for people who are no longer students here.”