The superintendent of Oak Park and River Forest High School is looking for a distraction-free year. Nice thought. Fat chance.
We live for distraction these days. Real frustrations and faux outrage mesh regularly on social media to gin up a storm. If we’re not talking loud, connecting dots into conspiracies, doubting the motivations and competency of people we elect and hire, we seem to think we’re not fully alive.
But Joylynn Pruitt-Adams, OPRF’s chief, sees her stars aligned. Starting her fourth year, she has a top staff she has hired and positioned, a school board covering her back, a new equity plan to build out, a faculty contract signed, plans for major construction starting next year now settled, America to Me having stirred the pot, mainly for the good, but over. That’s a lot of pieces in place for her full-tilt charge toward, as she summarized it last week, “ensuring excellence and equity for all students.”
That would explain why Pruitt-Adams just put the kibosh on what seemed last spring to be a reasonable, modest, cheap, sort-of-fun plan to simplify and focus all the many logos, images, colors that various OPRF entities put on their activity websites, letterhead, football helmets, playbills.
When the project was announced last spring the school offered up a dizzying array of huskie dog images, typefaces, building sketches, and shades of orange and blue as examples of how the OPRF “brand” had wandered. Happens everywhere.
McDonald’s, about as brand-conscious a company as exists on earth, acknowledged recently that across this globe its “mark” had become a mishmash. Now, wait for the rollout, all future marketing and branding for McD’s will focus on the “Golden Arches” as the preeminent identifier of cheap burgers and salty French fries. At least until the brand starts the diffusion process all over again.
As happens these days, though, the “branding” talk at OPRF set off the chatter: “yet again,” “change for changes sake,” “we love the crest,” “what’s wrong with students and teachers that they can’t translate the Latin,” “you can’t change my school colors,” “Those Things That Are Best forever.”
In a pitiful way, I get it. In a moment when everything seems uncertain, when the sustaining message out of our high school is that systemic racism has — over decades, over a century — undercut efforts to educate every kid who comes our way, then pushback and defensiveness come in a lot of different varieties.
If one variety is to protect a school crest that no one really looks at or can readily explain, the right decision is to bury the issue as Pruitt-Adams has now done. Shouldn’t stop the school’s crack communications staff from gradually trying to coordinate and impose a little discipline on color palates, on whether the Huskie is looking left or right.
In a letter to the community last week, Pruitt-Adams said, in bold type but thankfully not ALL CAPS, “It was never our intention to eliminate the crest that has been a symbol of OPRF pride for 110 years, the school colors, the Huskie mascot, or the motto ‘Those Things That Are Best.'”
I know I’m in the minority but I’ve never been a fan of the motto. Reads as elitist to me in a school which — like about every school and long before this school was racially diverse — has underserved a wide segment of the student body that wasn’t college bound, wasn’t much sure where it was bound.
Again, not the moment to get in a social media storm about a motto. The focus now needs to be on the opportunity to grow enthusiasm and something close to consensus on truly making OPRF what is best for every single student.
That is a goal to rally around.
